The scene: My doctor’s office, late morning, the exam room. I watch the minutes tick by as I sit and wait, drumming my fingers on the table and trying not to think about my overwhelming to-do list for the day.
Mere minutes before, things seemed to be going smoothly. Appointments were running on time. We went through the usual drill, taking vital signs like weight (ugh), blood pressure, temperature, etc. Then the nurse pulled out her laptop to log the results — only to find that the screen was frozen and she couldn’t enter any data.
She tried a few fixes — ctrl+alt+delete, turning the laptop on and off. It didn’t work. More time went by. Finally, she turned to me in frustration.
“Sorry. I’ll guess I’ll log it later. I hate this system.”
“Maybe it’s your network,” I ventured carefully, before explaining that I work for a networking company.
(In hindsight, perhaps that wasn’t the most helpful thing to share in that moment.)
The side of your EHR you may not have considered
The EHR is now near-ubiquitous in healthcare settings (see this infographic for some interesting statistics). Accordingly, you probably put a lot of thought into which system you chose for your hospital or clinic. You deliberated over price comparisons, features, benefits, and more. But did you also consider the infrastructure that supports it — and what that means for your patients?
The speed and availability of your EHR system can have a big impact on the way patients experience their care. So can security, privacy, and easy access to data. All of these are issues that patients — and clinicians — value highly; and that can be improved with the underpinning of a modern network.
Watch this video to learn more about the EHR from the patient perspective. Then check out some solutions, from the data center to the enterprise network, that might help it run a little more smoothly. (And get annoying patients like me out the door more quickly.)
The use of electronic health records continues to be seen as the trend towards vast improvements in the health care system nationally. It is viewed to reduce overhead costs by a large percent in the long run, provide access to previously hard-to-obtain data that will help in research and in evidence-based medicine, possibly unite all health care institutions under one system in the future for better coordination and record-keeping.
I like the idea that we are in the very high tech way of system that we can find our records or we can have results in our health status quickly through this system. Thank you for the experience you shared