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  Your Data or Your Life
Medical Open Source Development Posted by Bob Austin, NREMT-Paramedic on Tuesday August 08, 2006 @ 09:14 PM
from the When Proprietary Licenses Go Bad dept.
Your daughter has just been in a car crash. She falls unconscious on her way to the hospital, but not before she is able to tell the paramedics the name of her doctor. This is vitally important because the emergency room won’t know that she’s an insulin-dependent diabetic with a penicillin allergy, but her doctor will be able to give them her relevant medical history. Or, at least he would be if he’d renewed the tech support contract on his medical records software. He didn’t, though, and now his information—and your daughter’s—is locked away in a proprietary database he can’t access. Digg this article

From Free Software Magazine article.

Also see this article: "Multiple Doctors Cut Off from Records by Dr. Notes" South Florida Business Journal.

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    Re: Your Data or Your Life
    by stapedium on Friday August 11, 2006 @ 12:00 PM
    Why did she tell them the name of her doctor instead of her spouse/parent/boyfriend? Any of these people are likely to know the essentials of her medical history. The fact that she is diabetic will be pretty obvious on her first set of blood labs. That she is penicillin allergic is not that essential since she doesn't have an active infection. And if she has an operation serious enough to need postop antibiotics she will be in an ICU with 1:1 or 1:2 nursing where any allergic rash will be picked up pretty quickly and the antibiotics changed. There are obviously situations where a very detailed past medical history can help, especially when following your own patient's, but the ER is not one of them.
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