Anything new under the sky?
Personal Health Records is not a new idea. For example in 2000 some researchers proposed in the British Medical Journal a system that resembles closely to the current Keyose system.
It is curious to see how those authors identified the importance of a really brief health summary (instead of the typical huge data repository that many enginerrs like to build). From the healthcare point of view the problem is not to have all the information, but only the relevant one.
It can be argued that most of the information relevant to a patient at the point of care is in the most recent entries of the record or, if one is produced, its abbreviated summary. Thus, it is a patient’s allergy to penicillin that is critical to future care, not previous hospitalisations for wrongful administration of the drug. The latest electrocardiographic results of a patient with coronary artery disease would be useful for emergency care, but not the numerous archived results typically found in the record. This vital information is not cumulative but cross sectional rather in nature. It explicitly does not cover a patient’s medical history but reflects information that is pertinent for future (emergency) care.
The question as to what information falls into this category is controversial. Ironically, this is one place where the shortage in time allocated for doctor-patient encounters has a positive side effect. In the United States managed care is openly promoting reductions in the length of such encounters (in some cases down to 7 minutes) in order to make best use of resources. With time so short, many healthcare providers now keep an accessible summary to avoid re-reading the whole of a patient’s medical record at each encounter. This summary holds brief, concise, and relevant information, exactly the type of information our system is built to deliver. We therefore believe that a patient’s principal healthcare coordinator is the appropriate authority to determine which medical information is relevant, beneficial, and “worth risking exposure” at the point of care.
2009-06-29 at 8.26 am
Very interesting post. We hope that health care system improves for the benefit of the patients and of course the health providers.