Category: EHRBook

My book “Rethinking the Electronic Healthcare Record” is now out. You can get it almost anywhere, but the best description is on the Amazon.com page.

The blurb:

Current electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems utterly fail to assist doctors and nurses in their work; designed without recognizing the actual needs of those users, but rather solving mostly administrative problems instead. This failure results in an ongoing lack of safety and efficiency in care delivery. We need to do much better. This book lays out how an effective EHR system should be built to deliver effective support for a doctor throughout the phases of her profession, from how a doctor learns her profession, to how she examines a patient, analyzes clinical findings, reaches conclusions, and finally applies therapy. The result is accurate, economic, safe, and consistent healthcare.

As mentioned before, I’m writing a book about how the EHR should be built and why. The latest, and possibly last, draft is available at:

http://wehlou.com/ehrbook/draft.pdf

This draft is significantly shorter and more focused than earlier drafts. I’ve also incorporated the “combinatorial matching” idea from L.L. Weed, and modified it to be more scalable. With that, I have a knowledge-based support and documentation system, with a complete flow from first patient contact to treatment. It goes way beyond what any current EHR systems do, and would be the help we need as doctors, instead of the drag of the current generation.

Any comments are welcome. My email can be found under the section “Draft Versions” in the manuscript. You can also comment on the blog itself, of course. At least during the first two weeks, then they’re closed (due to spam).

I just uploaded the next draft (v10) of my book on EHR systems. I included a chapter on business cases, and expanded quite a bit on the document tree structure.

You can find a diff file for version 10 there as well, if you want to focus on the changes.

Update May 13, 2014: I stupidly linked to a particular draft in the above post. A much better link is this:

Sorry about that piece of bad information.

Back in January, I began writing a book on the Electronic Healthcare Record. Not how they work (they don’t), not just what’s wrong with them (most everything), but mainly going back to basics and figuring out what they are really for. Or should be for, more accurately.

Current systems are a marvel of bad design and misunderstandings of purpose. I’m trying in the book to figure out why, and what to do to improve on things. The contents range between the medical and the technical, taking side roads into politics, both the office kind and the real kind.

The contents are mainly based on the Swedish situation, but I welcome any input on how it is elsewhere. If I can be made to understand the differences, I’ll only be too happy to take that into account in the text.

I’m hoping with this book to make the stakeholder ask the right questions, else there is no hope we’ll ever get the right answers.

From today, I’ll publish my latest draft weekly (if I can keep it up) at:

http://wehlou.com/ehrbook/draft.pdf

I’ll welcome any comments in any form, but you’ll have to email them to me at martin@wehlou.com, or even better, post them as messages on our forum. You can register for the forum at:

http://vard-it.com/vi

The intention is to have it ready for publication sometime in June 2014. I’ll publish it under our own name through one of the publish on demand sites.