Having spend some time on looking at the available software, I can only say that currently, we simply have an abundance of development, but little progress. I keep seeing multiple projects trying to achieve the same thing, but the resources are spread too think and so they fail. I wonder if there were some way to concentrate the various developers onto one project. The questions remain as to what main ideas should be focused on. Obviously the first one should be a Medical records application. That is a coherent, portable, way to contain, process, and use all the medical data that is generate by a patient.
The second focus should be on software for a workign clinic. This seems to be much harder since it would involve the billling seciton. However this would also include things like scheduling and multitude of forms that a clinic uses in day to day use.
THe third focus (one I know little about) would be in the more specialized applications like Imagaing, which seems to already have quite a bit of working software, but is inherently hard to make because not everyone has access to CT scanners and such.
Now that I have been working for almost two weeks, here are a few things I have learned. While a resident, I did part of my training at the VA hospitals which had a superb information system, but it required that we type out everything from the smallest order to the emergency stat orders. This seemed to work weel for teh VA since most of the Doctors had residents do their notes or they tended to dictate very little, writing very breif, sometimes cryptic, notes about the status of their patient. Now that I am in the private world, the only thing that seems to be saving medicine are the transciptionists who take the garbled spped talk that doctors do and type out coherent statements. The problem that I see with many of these data systems is that seem to assume that doctors have the time which they dont (there is barely enough time to see a patient properly let alone do all the coding na dthen write out a clear note.
Several idea come out that doctors will merely have to tick off boxes on a palm device to indicate what they did, but this is fine for billing but not so for the actualy medical record, which even though is breif contains much more subtley then any billing coding system could have. Perhaps what we need is to maintain the medical record in its narrative form and have a parser go throught it and pull the important bits and then it would enter this stuff into database. It is an idea, but surely a worthwhile one since Doctors simply can not sit aroung computer terminals (as I am doing, but it is a Sunday)