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One of the key components to a digital hospital is an electronic health record.
And what that is is everything a recording on a patient is being recorded
in the computer. So we're not going all over the place looking for information;
we're not trying to send somebody down a medical records to run up with
with paper; we're not writing on paper and then writing some in the computer and
toggling back and forth it's all online.
Patients will now be able to find their information online -
hopefully on the bedside terminals they'll be able to click on their patient
portal and they'll be able to say, "look, my lab results are back" or 'here's a note my
doctor has written to me' or 'here's
a piece of information that my physician wanted me to read about or
a video my physician wanted me to see'. As I'm working in the Emergency Department,
I'm in one area seeing patients, treating patients, but there are things that are
happening to my patients in other areas
of the Emergency Department - how mine to know what's going on? How will I know that lab
results are are coming back in? How will I know
that the nurses have documented something or noticed something on my patient
that's important?
I will know because I can see on a tracker that there are alerts.
The nurses can document and I can see it from any area in the hospital. I don't have to
be
staring at a piece of paper. It's all about improving communications. So it's
improving
communication between the nurses and physicians, between
the physicians and allied health, it's helping us work together as a team
and it's also improving communication between the
the care providers and the patient and their family themselves.
So one of the key components of the electronic health record is a functional
problem list.
This is something that the the providers are constantly updating: what
are the problems that we're dealing with with these patients and how are we
handling them? What are the key pieces of information that we've gathered along
the way?
And it's all available on a summary screen so instead of going through
files and files and and does sometimes you can have
three or four screens of just the names of documents and instead of having to
open up every document
it's all provided for you on one screen. So one of the really exciting projects
that we're rolling out in the next year
is the electronic discharge summary. So what's going to happen is that at the
end of the patient's visit,
the physician will generate an electronic discharge summary that pulls any
information that we've been entering
throughout the entire patient stay. It's something that is generated
as the patient is getting ready to leave the hospital so they walk out with a
piece of paper in hand
that they can take with them, they have the same information can be transmitted
to their family practice doctors so they
have proper follow-up and that same information can also be posted on the
patient portal so they can view it or they can have their family members view
it with them
and understand what happened to them and what the next steps are.