Just wanted to post about VitalHub, the latest in iPhone + EMR — being developed and implemented in-house at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto!
Watch the beautiful video of it in action, courtesy of the Apple website.
The essentials:

VitalHub allows health care professionals to access records from 66 applications being used at Mount Sinai Hospital, including those storing clinical data, reference materials, and patient information.

“We now have access to exactly what we have in our computers here in the …

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“Geography is destiny in medicine.” –Jack Lord, MD
In my undergrad English lit courses, I heard a lot about “character is destiny”. Which is a fancy way of blowing things out of proportion – e.g., Romeo and Juliet didn’t die via the quality of being “star-crossed”, but because they were super emo.
Well, this week, I watched a TED talk by Bill Davenhall (below) that claimed “geography is destiny”.
This idea is not so exaggerated. Just watch it (9 min.):

What it says: …

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The same CBC article (on Canadian doctors’ love-hate relationship with EMRs) that featured Dr. Greiver’s EMR also published this comment that didn’t sit very well with me:
"Let’s be honest," says researcher Dave Ludwick. "Doctors have gone to school to become doctors, to understand how the body works and remedy that body’s failings, not to do IT. And yet with electronic records, IT suddenly becomes their job, too."

I am aware that this doesn’t exactly say that IT isn’t the physician’s job, …

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*I promised I’d share Toronto physician blogs if I found them, so here’s a GREAT one: Dr. Greiver’s EMR. She’s a family doc in North York and was recently featured on the CBC for her > 4 year documentation of the peaks and valleys of running with the Nightingale EMR (one of the ones subsidized by the Ontario government).
Today’s post is inspired by Dr. Greiver and a lifetime of paper-love.

There’s just something about paper. You can’t get rid of it.
A …

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The success of electronic medical records (EMR) depends on much more than the EMR itself, but intuitive, smart software is still important. In this post (Merry Christmas!), I will talk about one tough issue in particular, the search problem, and why a “finder” like Google Wave (June, November) might be a good idea.
Larger electronic record projects may show us what’s needed.
Yesterday, I read an article (National Post) on MyLifeBits, a kind of Electronic “Life” Record. Since 1998, Gordon Bell, a …

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