I don’t know about you but it always makes me a little nervous when I go to the doctor and see her keying something into a tablet or laptop (maybe I should be more worried if she didn’t!).
But the gap between our relationship with our doctors and medical technology is increasing, and as Adriana Lopez sees it, it’s not for the better. In fact, she writes that it’s “causing inefficiencies throughout every stage of the patient/provider relationship, beginning with the first encounter in the exam room.”
“Have we focused so much on figuring out how computers work, rather than focusing on humans?” she writes.
She’s not alone. Dr. Manny Alvarez of Fox News is particularly concerned about new software that can analyze a patient at the end of life and predict when he or she will die.
The idea behind it was laudable – to help prevent over-testing and over-treatment of some patients, or under-treatment for healthier patients -- according to the healthtechzone story. The software uses a range of “assessment scales” to determine the chances of death within six months to five years. But Dr. Alvarez fears the way medicine is going, doctors are “relying on computerized testing before they have any idea of what’s going on.”
And now Dr. Peter Ragusa has created a solution to help the areas of healthcare that especially suffer from lack of communication, according to Lopez’s story. “He wanted technology and computers to understand how people worked rather than the other way around,” she writes.
So Dr. Ragusa, Rand Ragusa, and Jeff Miller “created Better Day electronic health record (EHR), a web-based platform that uses predictive modeling and third party applications to better manage a patient’s health” through the company it founded, VoiceHIT.
According to Lopez, the collaborative system takes a proactive approach to healthcare to make sure the patient receives the attention needed, not just relying on old data.
The communications problems go all the way back to the very start of the visit, she writes. Dr. Ragusa told Lopez that communications problems typically begin in the exam room where the patient and doctor may meet for the first time.
“When the patient is giving the healthcare provider intimate details about their lives and health in the exam room, the provider is normally facing a computer and has their back turned to the patient creating an emotional and even physical barrier between them,” he told Lopez. “The patient may not be getting the proper attention, and those barriers may keep the patient from providing intimate details that may be pertinent to their care and evaluation.”
The system is simple. The VoiceHIT platform takes the information that has already been assembled on the patient -- including any applications or devices that the patient may use on a daily basis to track their health -- to predict irregularities. For diabetics, the software determines when the patient needs medical attention “using the patient’s documented data, daily routine, and results from their blood sugar tests,” Lopez writes.
Often, these types of measures can prevent serious complications, such as amputation or blindness, common outcomes for diabetics who let their insulin levels rise dangerously without doing anything about it, according to Lopez.
And yet, in many places where it’s hard to get to the doctor, or urgent, “telemedicine” can provide life-saving services to patients like stroke victims.
The VoiceHIT system will launch February 1st in Nashville.
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Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves
