Chart Changes in Vital Signs – Digital Efficiency
We’ve all seen the emergency room dramas on television where the good looking doctor or nurse strides into the room, flips open the patient’s chart and delivers the genius diagnosis or the earth shattering prognosis. Even though these are fictional situations, it is very much a reality that doctors that are spread among several patients depend on these charts to know what’s going on with their patients at any given time. Ever wondered what are in those all important charts? They contain information about current condition and medications that have been administered. As more health care providers switch to electronic health records, chart changes in vital signs are going to be even easier to track.
For a long time, patient medical histories and hospital charts have been kept on paper and changes by hand whenever the patient improves or takes a turn for the worst. These charts are necessary to keep lines of communication clear between doctors and nurses, who might take turns attending to a particular patient over the hours and days that they are being cared for. Although this system is fraught with error, such as difficult handwriting, human error when recording vital signs and the use of lots and lots of paper, there haven’t been any better ways to track chart changes in vital signs, until now.
Part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included funding and incentives for hospitals and doctors’ offices that were willing to make the switch from paper to electronic medical record keeping systems. This means that for those health care providers that were willing to make the switch from inefficient, hard to share paper charts, to digital tools and software that would track chart changes in vital signs in real time, keeping track of their patients and their current condition would get a whole lot easier.
Using electronic tools for tracking chart changes in vital signs would increase the accuracy of patient records, as well as allowing doctors and nurses to almost instantly respond to fluctuations and administer medications and other treatments that would prevent fatalities. Although these electronic tools will not solve all the problems in the health care industry over night, it will be a first step toward completely digitizing patient records and improving the information sharing techniques that will allow doctors and specialists to collaborate on the treatment of their patients. One of the barriers to national implementation currently, is access to certified, secure software systems.
