December 18th, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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For a while now we’ve been talking about issues related to psychiatry and electronic medical records. Roy is very interested in the evolution of EHR’s.
I don’t like them. I think they have too many problems still, both in terms of issues of efficiency and time, and how they divert the physician’s attention away from the patient, and they focus medical appointments on the collection of data– data that is used in a checkbox form: patient is not suicidal and I asked, whether it was clinically relevant or not– and will therefore serve as protection in a lawsuit, or demographic information used by insurers, the government, who knows.
From a privacy standpoint, I think they are appalling. If you are a patient in the hospital where I work, you get Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
November 26th, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Opinion
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I’ve been asked several ‘ethical dilemmas’ in the past few weeks. I’m putting them up on Shrink Rap, but please don’t get hung up on the details. These aren’t my patients, but the details of the stories are being distorted to disguise those involved. The question, in both cases, boils down to: Should the mental health professional report the patient to his professional board?
In the first case, a psychiatrist is treating a nurse who is behaving badly. The nurse is stealing controlled substances from the hospital and giving them to friends who ‘need’ them. She doesn’t intend to stop, and her contact with the psychiatrist was only for an appointment or two before she ended treatment. Should the psychiatrist contact the state’s nursing board? Is he even allowed to?
In the second case, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
November 25th, 2011 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in Opinion
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This is my 3rd year participating in The Engage with Grace Blog Rally. Engage With Grace is a movement designed to help advance the conversation about the end-of-life experience. It began with a simple idea: Create a tool to get people talking. Their tool is a slide with five questions designed to initiate dialog about our end-of-life preferences. I originally heard about Engage with Grace from Paul Levy and he’s at it again this year.
This campaign has forced me to Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
November 21st, 2011 by Shadowfax in Opinion
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We respond to certain “Code Blue” situations in our hospital. In the ED, of course, and in the outpatient areas and radiology, and if needed as back-up in the inpatient units. The hospital issues one of those overhead calls when there is a code blue — a cardiac arrest or other collapse, person down, injury, etc., but we also carry a pager in the ER in case we don’t hear the overhead call. The pager also signifies which doc is designated to respond to such a call, since we often have 8 docs working at once. It’s a little ritual we have at change of shift, passing off the pager and the spectralink phone, like the passing of the torch to the oncoming doc.
So of course I took the pager home the other day and had to make an extra trip to the hospital to return it. Ugh.
As I was driving back in, I took a moment to really look at the thing, and it struck me that this pager is the exact same model I used in medical school and residency, way back in the mid nineties. The exact same one: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
November 14th, 2011 by Emergiblog in Opinion
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Reader’s Digest has published an article, “50 Secrets Nurses Won’t Tell You“. The link will take you to the article itself, and Sandy Summers has written a review of the article at The Truth About Nursing.
There are some interesting “secrets” here – and you’ll recognize a few of the names!
Gina from Code Blog is in there, and so is Jo from Head Nurse!
**********
I’ll be the first person to tell you that I am not a perfect person, and not a perfect nurse, but two of these “secrets” really ticked me off.
Royally.
The first one: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Emergiblog*
For a while now we’ve been talking about issues related to psychiatry and electronic medical records. Roy is very interested in the evolution of EHR’s.
