apractis.com Blog

I was asked to present on electronic health records, registries, and information technology at a national conference on Birth Defects Prevention Network. I thought of this while at the meeting:

Some have too many, and some have too few
Some have three when they only need two
Many are green when they want to be red
And some just feel funny, but its all in the head

But no one can know what is true in advance
So it’s better to not leave surveillance to chance
It is data, my dear that we must get together
It has to be better than a bet on the weather

Along come the digital fairies to show
It is not just our labs that create things we know
Our fingers send data to systems that thrive
But we’ve clicked till our mice are now barely alive

I am convinced that the application of the concept of litigation into an industry where the primary decision makers are by definition trained and forced to make decisions in the presence of incomplete knowledge that is of uncertain validity (a core competency of clinicians)–makes no sense at all. Forget whether it is outrageously expensive, increases costs with no level of predictability and seems to have no one accountable for the ramifications of its existence. It just should not exist in concept. It is the systems of care that are essential to peoples’ safety, and all emphasis of liability should be on those systems.