The Year Health Records Went Digital
In February, the HITECH Act put federal money — billions — behind a simple proposition: a patient’s record should not be a paper folder that lives in one office. This fall, our SafeHealth team at Court Square Data Group, where I serve as chief architect, received the AMDIS 2009 award for Most Innovative System, for building exactly that: one unified record that follows the patient. Two announcements, one story.
What a unified record looks like from the floor instead of the brochure: a physician who is not reconciling three clipboards and a fax before she can treat anyone. One patient, one record, at the point of care. That sentence took years of unglamorous integration work, and it is the proudest line on my résumé.
The federal money will make a lot of hospitals buy software. Vendor decks will call that transformation. It is not. Adoption is a clinician choosing the system at 2 a.m. because it is faster than the workaround — or not choosing it. The systems that win are the ones that get chosen at 2 a.m. — that is how they win.
A design brief for whoever builds in this space next: your users have no time, no patience for extra clicks, and patients depending on the workflow. Build the thing they reach for at 2 a.m. We tried to.