This post is part of a series detailing the problems of current electronic healthcare records. To orient yourself, you can start at the index page on “presentation” on the iota wiki. You will find this and other pages on that wiki as well. The wiki pages will be continuously updated. Current electronic health-care record systems [...]

This post is part of a series detailing the problems of current electronic healthcare records. To orient yourself, you can start at the index page on “presentation” on the iota wiki. You will find this and other pages on that wiki as well. The wiki pages will be continuously updated. Since current electronic health care [...]

The entries in our electronic health care records as they are currently built, only give us a chronological list of measurements and changes of the patient’s condition and investigations and treatments applied to him. A number of these steps naturally result in a change in the status of the patient, such as becoming less ill [...]

Patients naturally progress through life by accumulating some diseases and becoming cured from other diseases. The accumulated diseases are what we call “chronic diseases”. Typical examples are diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, vascular disease, hypertension, etc. Other, temporary, diseases are for example: bone fracture, most infections, myocardial infarctions (except for the underlying vascular disease), and an increasing [...]

Electronic health care record systems are widely and frequently claimed to reduce injury and death due to prescription errors, since they are able to detect and warn for interactions between products. This claim is largely nonsense, because of the following: Interactions between products are not the only dangerous effects we have from bad prescriptions Interactions [...]

Prescriptions made in classic EHR systems have no context of “why” and “for what”. The only information about the reason for the prescription is an entirely optional field on the physical label informing the patient about the purpose of the medication. That is far from sufficient. The drawbacks due to the lack of a structured [...]

I’m at point 2 in the list of problems we need to solve. You can also find this text, possibly improved, on the iotaMed wiki. As new discoveries are made in medicine, we need to get these out to “the factory floor”, so they are applied in practice. If there’s a new more efficient diagnostic [...]

Let’s expand on the first item in the list I made in the previous post. I called this item “Lack of overview of the patient”, and that’s actually a pretty serious understatement of the problem. What we get in most electronic healthcare records systems is an evenly thick layer of prose stretching from a variable [...]

As the interest in iotaMed and the problems it is intended to solve clearly increases, we need to get our ducks in a row and make it simple to follow and to argue. Let’s do it the classic way: What is the problem? What is the solution? How do we get there? Let’s do these [...]

…um, at least as far as medical records go. SQL remains useful for a lot of other things, of course. But as far as electronic medical records are concerned, SQL is a really bad fit and should be taken out back and shot. Medical records, in real life, consist of a pretty unpredictable stack of [...]