workflow

Well, we’ve discussed the good, the bad and the ugly of clinical information systems – particularly the patient/clinician barrier that can be created and workflow disruptions. So now what?  For the past three years of my life I, have lived and breathed mobile point of care (MPOC) and if I have learned one thing from being on inpatient units with clinicians, the key word is flexibility. 

So, here we are in 2009, clinical information systems have been around for almost 20 years, but where do we stand?  According to HIMSS Analytics, 45 percent of healthcare facilities have a clinical data repository, clinical flow sheet documentation, some form of error checking decision support, picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) available outside radiology, and the basic three ancillaries; lab, radiology, and pharmacy systems.  So, we are doing pretty well, right?  Let’s take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Paper, paper everywhere - It’s now the 1960’s and the healthcare environment is starting to change.  Medicare and Medicaid have been enacted and cost-based reimbursement had become the norm.  Information technology consists of mainframes and centralized computing and there are very few vendor-developed applications.  The focus is all about billing so the majority of development efforts are directed to administrative and financial systems.  Most of the early development in hospital information systems (HIS) is done by academic and large hospitals.  These

Thanks to our community and the more than 330 participants who joined us for the Jan. 29 webinar, Managing Change: How to Overcome Obstacles and Encourage Mobile Technology Adoption. Our three distinguished speakers described how they addressed real-world challenges in implementing mobile point-of-care technologies, including wireless networks and mobile devices.