The future of health care informatics is only limited by what can be imagined. It wasn’t too many years ago that using the Da Vinci for surgery would have seemed like “space age technology” and now it is reality in many hospitals. Patients can now have their own website linked with their healthcare system where they can view labs and send message directly to their physician or nurse and schedule appointments. These are just two examples of relatively new technology that wasn’t even a thought not so many years ago. So, put on your thinking caps and come up with some ideas and it just might become reality.
I personally would love to see medications listed as a hyperlink in the EHR that would take you directly to the side effects and suggested management of those side effects. I am a clinic oncology nurse and we deal with many medication side effects on a daily basis. Although we do have access to drug books and also online resources, it takes time to look up the drug and then find the side effects. Many times, you then have to go to another area to find management of those side effects. When you do this for multiple patients a day, it becomes very time consuming. These links could also alert you to potential drug interactions. In the hospital setting, this could also check IV compatibility. These links could also be accessible to the patient through their “my chart” access. The patient could click on the hyperlink and answer a list of questions that would then either trigger possible home remedies or, alternatively, send the nurse and physician an alert to potential serious complications. Anytime the patient accessed one of these links and answered questions, this would create an automatic progress note in the chart with the questions and the patient answers so the side effects could be tracked to see if the patient was responding to management techniques. This would allow the patient to feel like they are more involved in their care and had more control. This would be especially wonderful in the field of oncology nursing where almost every medication you give to your patient, be it oral or IV, will cause side effects, some harmless and some life threatening.
So ask yourself, where do you see the future of health care headed and is there anything that you can to do help implement those advances?
