Åtta.

Total volunteer hours for Spring of 2015 = 64 hours = 8 hours in Habitat for Humanity (construction) + 56 hours in Neuro ICU for Tulane Medical Center

I always had the impression that technology would make everything better; in particular, the keeping of medical records of patients and charting by nurses and doctors.  Yet, it would be technology that I hear nurses and doctors complained about a lot.  Switching to electronic seems to have slowed down productivity and decreased the time nurses and doctors can spend with patients.

 First of all, oldies who lived through the internet-less era were thrust into a rapidly-changing age of technology and advances; any new hardware, software, and policies are a maze of extra actions tacked upon what people were already doing with paper (hard-copy charting does not usually gets changed abruptly to electronic, and sometimes hospital keeps both old and new for the sake of habits, doubling or even tripling the work load).  But perhaps that is just a generational thing?

We should look at the things in the long term, the generation of doctors growing up with technology should navigate perfectly the advances of our age and use technology to smooth the work flow of the hospital.  But even that has not panned out.  The reason, secondly, is that every hospital and sometimes even clinics within the same hospital, usually uses different software.  Ideally, all the things done to a patient would be documented in one hospital could be seamlessly transferred to another hospital, eliminating the need for retesting and allowing doctors to get right to diagnosing and treating.  In practice, every hospital wants its own software to the exclusion of other hospitals, a frustrating circumstance for up-and-coming doctors who learn in one hospital, does residency in another, and specialization training in yet another (not to mention rotations in different departments which may also use different software).  Why haven't we implemented system that makes sense yet?

 There should be a consolidated program that all hospitals agree to use, just to get a little order in this mishmash.  But wouldn't that be lucrative for the company that gets that gig?  Technological companies all vy for the same post; and when the dust clears from this marketplace competition, perhaps one software will finally be adopted unanimously.  And how long would this take, while the sick are neglected because the nurse and doctors can't get through the slogs of inefficient electronic charting?  What we need now is order and user-friendly charting.

Until next time...