3 Laws of Hospital Health Information Technology (HIT) Implementation.
1) Implementers and salespeople who don’t know what they are doing will always get a binding, multi-year contract first.
2) Hospital management and owners will always do the wrong thing.
3) Everyone will grossly underestimate the time, difficulty, and expense it takes to fully implement Health IT in a hospital.
Scott Silverstein, MD has come up with a Informed Consent on Use of HIT: “Patients currently are subject to the effects upon their care of electronic medical devices known collectively as “clinical IT” (electronic health records, computerized physician order entry, clinical decision support, clinical data repositories, etc.), but are not informed of the nature of this IT nor its possible adverse effects on their care. The consent forms they do sign are, therefore, incomplete. I am proposing a “Patient Rights Statement and Informed Consent on Use of Clinical IT Devices” be required at healthcare organizations using this technology. Here is a draft of such a consent:”
Enormous SoftOnline (ESO) Corp. announced its latest initiative in Health IT: GooVault. According to Trotter Valdes Vice Director of saying “Ha!” to Competitors, GooVault will initially do pathology sample tracking: “We think that in order to have comprehensive Health IT software, you have to start at where the patient is. That means patient parts. If patient parts are tracked by our software, then we will dominate! I mean, how much more basic can you get than actual tissue?” ESO announced a training video here.
Editor: This is a work of satire, hope you enjoy it. The heated battle between paper companies and proprietary EHR companies for market share is always fascinating to watch. Linux Medical News labs weighs in on the subject by doing a rigorous, side-by-side comparison of Paper company products vs. proprietary Electronic Health Record software company products. The results may surprise you.
Cars become inaccessible in an automatic parking garage when contract dispute takes an ugly turn. After escorting attendants out of the garage, the city finds they are unable to operate the garage robots without violating I.P. A policy expert suggests law to address “cases of vital infrastructure, like hospitals…an overly restrictive license might not hold up in court.”
The article Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars can be found on Wired.
Newsforge has an article that puts the shoe on the other foot regarding the old saw that Linux ‘is good, but not quite ready for the desktop’ by making spot-on remarks about Windows deficiencies that make it not quite ready for the desktop. My favorite is his discussion about that ‘precious’ product key: ‘…During my attempts at Windows XP installation, the combination of the LiquidVideo monitor and the HP Compaq d220 microtower’s onboard video produced constant, totally annoying screen blinking that made it almost impossible to do things like type in the long, so-precious “Product Key.” Note that this “Key” is not a simple, English-language password, but a 20-character string of apparently random letters and numbers. It took me several tries to type the “Product Key” correctly without being able to see it on screen because of the constant blinking. I doubt that most users would put up with this problem. I suspect that most would simply return their copy of Windows XP to the store where they bought it and go back to familiar, user-friendly Linux…’