During the early 90’s, I operated a computer consulting business. One of my clients was a dentist. He was a man who loved technology and hired me to install a network of computers in is office. The goal was for him to be able to access patient records, x-rays, and other data from any terminal in his office. This was no ordinary task. Back then the top of the line computer had 486 processor, 1 megabyte of memory, and a 40-megabyte hard drive. A compact disk writer was brand new technology and most networked computers were in large companies not in a small business. The hardware was just half the battle. My biggest challenge would come when I would need to integrate, medical billing software, patient information, patient records, x-rays, and what ever else the doctor wanted stored. To make things even harder I had a limited budget.
The doctors reasoning for all this was to reduce his overhead. He was spending a large amount of money every month storing patient records. He could only see a few patients a day because an employee would sometimes need to drive a couple of miles and search though his storage area to find needed files to bring back to the office for review. Seeing how much money was spent doing this convinced him that there must be a better way. I agreed and started work on solving his problem. I wont go into details, suffice to say, most of his goals were meet. It would take technology a few more years to be able to complete his dream.
Lets jump a head to today. All of what my dentist client asked for can be done very simply today. Most doctors and dentist use some sort of electronic patient record storage system. What is needed now is a smart system that will streamline the filing of claims, ensure accurate and secure patient information, and allow patient record secure access anywhere.
This is my design for the all in one device. It will store all your medical records or be the key to access your records from a secure site. It will transmit and receive information and updates via RFID. It will display general information incase of an accident i.e. what medications you are taking, allergies, and who to contact. Once connected to the health care providers system, it will fill out the proper forms, if needed send prescriptions to the pharmacy, and since it is also your flexible spending account debit card, it will pay the bill and update your balance.
All of the technologies exist today to build this device or we could just write a Java based program that could do the same and be loaded into a cell phone or flash memory. The savings in time will reduce cost for doctors who must pay a lot for storage, employees to file claims, payment collection etc. The patient will benefit by always having important medical information with them, avoid medications that they are allergic to, and reduce the amount of time waiting for things to happen. When you are sick or dying speed is essential.
There needs to be standards that health care professionals must conform to such as digital note taking. Speech recognition or typing data in to a persons file will reduce the redundancy of note taking and transcription. They must decide on what each prognosis will be called. This will facilitate database accuracy. There are many more standard to workout, and since I am not a health care provider the rest should be left up to them.
This is just one piece of my health care plan. There are a few more to go. So to keep this as post short as possible, I will stop now.
