Your Role in Health IT

摘要

The following is an excerpt of an open letter to medical students. You can find the complete letter at www.amsa. org/tnp. [We] want to tell you about some other critical reforms to our health care system that have taken effect recently, and where we especially need your help to get the message out. One really significant way that we can reform [how] we practice medicine is through the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records. Every doctor knows that she is only as good as the information she has about her patients. Information is the lifeblood of medicine. Without clinical data-progress notes, laboratory data, images, microbiology reports-we're reduced to guesswork. Yet, the United States today lives with a health information system that relies on the same technology-pen and paper-that Hippocrates used 2,400 years ago. Every aspect of your lives is computerized, from laptops to cell phones to pagers. You're connected 24/7.... Can you imagine caring for patients 20 years from now without computers, without electronic health records, without the ability to send patient information electronically from your office to the hospital, from one hospital to another, from the hospital to your office? It would be like practicing medicine with one hand tied behind your back.