Data Druggies

By PHILIP ALLEN GREEN, MD
We are data druggies.
We spend our days like desperate junkies crawling the carpet, sifting through the shaggy strands of patient histories with shaky fingers in search of facts. Every word our patients utter we feed to the never-ending demands of the electronic chart.
We find a fact and we enter it. The database grows. Someone somewhere adds another question we are supposed to ask our patients. We get back on our hands and knees. We start sifting once again.
Have you been to the continent of Africa in the last twenty-one days? Click. Do you or a loved one feel threatened at home? Click. How was your experience today? Click.
In the background the blood pressure cuff inflates, the quiet hiss filling the room. The monitor beeps along with the patient’s pulse, each ding another penny tossed into the ever-growing bank of patient data.
The data does not lie, we are told. The more data we enter, the better the patient encounter can be captured. The better captured, the better it can be used to guide us to provide care, as if we are blind from darkness and the data in the chart is light itself.
I sign up for my next patient. Fussy baby. Normal vitals. Vaccinations up to date. No red flags triggered in triage.
Proceed, the computer tells me.
I step into the room.
A baby boy lies on the gurney. He is pink and warm with little toes and fingers. When he sees me he wiggles chubby arms and legs in the air while cooing at the bright lights above, drooling and s...

Source: The Health Care Blog - June 22, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB Data Philip Allen Green Source Type: blogs