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Thankfully I haven't had many reasons to enter a U.S. hospital, but the few interactions I had were extremely worrisome. For example, when my grandmother fell
by Smudge 10y ago
Thankfully I haven't had many reasons to enter a U.S. hospital, but the few interactions I had were extremely worrisome.
For example, when my grandmother fell ill, my family spent a lot of time visiting her. My mother, in particular, spent many days and nights there, and her biggest complaint was the complete lack of communication between shifts.
Every few hours, someone new would come into the room, read my grandmother's charts, wake my grandmother up, and ultimately misinterpret several important details. Thankfully my mother was often there to correct them and fill them in on what previous nurses/doctors had already done, but the net result was that my grandmother barely got any rest (being constantly woken for no apparent reason) and, had my mother not been there, a nurse or doctor could easily have made a critical mistake when continuing her treatment.
Another example, still the same grandmother. Even though her original condition improved (after having been rushed to a different hospital), she ended up going home with an entirely new infection which resulted in several more weeks of sickness and eventual recovery. The infection (C. Diff) is one of the leading Hospital-acquired infections and is in many cases totally preventable. It's hard to believe how many people die each year due to infections they pick up in hospitals.
- calcsam 10y agoThere's a startup, Medisas, that's aiming to solve this exact problem: https://www.medisas.com/transitions-of-care https://www.medisas.com/transitions-of-care
- blaze33 10y ago> her biggest complaint was the complete lack of communication between shifts. Hmm seems weird and easily addressable to me, I had to spend some time in a hospital in Paris (France) and the staff had a meeting between every shift to discuss how patients were going. To the point that people complained they weren't available at that time... But yeah no experience with US hospitals so YMMV.
- hellofunk 10y agoMost human errors are easily preventable.
- ashearer 10y agoWe're addressing this problem at Care Thread (http://www.carethread.com http://www.carethread.com), where we integrate patient-centered messaging and EMR data to ensure that everyone stays in the loop. Existing electronic medical records systems are at their best for long-term documentation, and fall short on keeping care providers abreast of ever-changing plans across shift transitions. Pagers and phones, which doctors and nurses use instead for real-time communication, fare even worse. The information is simply invisible to the next person who takes over. We've had terrific, sustained adoption where Care Thread's system is deployed, and are working to measure the effect on patient outcomes. Some study results are pending (from Partners / Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, where researchers put iPads in the hands of patients and used our mobile messaging system to help keep care providers aligned with each other and with patients).