Finally, we’re past the summing up of the problems in current health-care record systems. It was long, depressing, and admittedly quite boring at times, but oh so necessary. I hope you’re all in a suitably despaired state of mind to crave some solutions to all this misery, but first let’s see what we endured. I [...]

Since current electronic health-care record systems are largely text based, there is a large amount of text to be written after each encounter. In Sweden, doctors generally dictate the entry after each encounter, and a secretary then types it out. The same procedure is used for referrals, reports, and letters. Brevity in notes is definitely [...]

Current electronic health-care systems are built as monoliths. They are constructed and sold as all-in-one solutions, largely because of the failure of care provider organizations to successfully manage collections of smaller, more specialized systems. This failure is caused by two factors: The failure of the smaller vendors to cooperate and produce simple methods of supporting [...]

Electronic health-care records must implement and respect confidentiality settings, such that certain care givers will not be able to view information that the patient may not want them to. There are many aspects to this problem, such as if the doctor should be able to break these confidentiality barriers in emergency situations, if the existence [...]

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 [...]