A typical day on the ward

Re:A typical day on the ward by jvdh on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @03:43AM (#8008514)

This description of a typical day on the ward is of course ridiculously inefficient to us as digital natives. We deal with information flows every day and can imagine ten different systems that could do this without even opening the door to the hospital.

The big 'but' is that there are so many hidden requirements here. Privacy is a huge concern. Data on patients may not leave the hospital. With the devices we have these days, it is almost impossible to create a near offline system. Almost all devices are connected to "the cloud" in some form or another, making them vulnerable.

The fact that health insurers are grossly incompetent in this aspect does not mean that hospitals should go down to that level.

Another hidden requirement is that this system has to work, always, no matter what happens. Paper notes may not be efficient, or complete. However, you can be pretty sure that while the hospital is still standing, this system works. Making a digital system that is as reliable is a very hard task.

All this will make such a system a huge investment, not only the system itself, but also in training. Balanced against the cost, it is not so evident that this is really an acceptable investment.

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Re:A typical day on the ward by ACow_Adonis on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @04:41AM (#8008645)

I dunno about the "always works" claim. I have nothing to do with health care, per se, but I always tell everyone to factor in a base 1%-5% error rate for basic information and data entry that a human beings end up doing manually...

I imagine the number of errors/deaths/kerfuffles due to the opportunity cost of professional time, not to mention transcription and human errors of such systems are not inconsequential...even if they aren't at the forefront of our minds, and even if some of them haven't been measured accurately.

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Re:A typical day on the ward by jvdh on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @05:19AM (#8008739)

You are never going to take away the human from this equation. Notes are taken over the course of the day, and many of the proposed systems end up taking more time: nurses do their rounds, use pen and paper to take notes while walking around, and at the end of the shift copy the notes from the paper into the system.

This means that you have basically added another data entry level, increasing both time and error rate.

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Re:A typical day on the ward by ACow_Adonis on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @06:28AM (#8008919)

Well I can't comment on the system/app offered by the author of the OP, but obviously the point of designing a system to fix/improve such operations wouldn't just be adding another level of data entry and subsequently multiply risk, but instead to minimize it.

The goal is not to remove humans from the equation, since that is probably both impossible and undesired, but to separate humans and computers into supporting each other in the task at hand by specialising into what they do best: computers for tasks that can be broken down into repetition, replication, automation, speed, validation, and volume, and humans for creation, ambiguity, complexity, context, service delivery and interpretation.

At the moment i'm guessing there's a fair bit of humans doing the jobs computers are good at in hospitals around the world...

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Re:A typical day on the ward by jacobgreenleaf on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @04:00AM (#8008550)

The MVP for that system wouldn't be all patient data, it'd be just one metric or something that you could harden the system's other properties against. If you leak one metric, you probably leak them all (and the inverse is probably true). The training costs are amortized because they are dominated by one-time costs of learning the system for one metric, not all metrics.

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