Oxbow to the rescue

I was just eavesdropping on my husband's phone conversation with his Oxbow colleagues. They're deep in discussion about how to bring their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software to market. He was reading them a Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article
(sorry, unless you have a membership you'll just be able to see the extract here) about how the current EMRs on the market don't provide good querying capabilities since most of the record is in "free text" format. This gives OK information on an individual patient, while you're looking at the patient record. But what happens, if in the case of our practice yesterday, your practice receives a limited number of flu vaccines? Shouldn't your EMR allow you to run a query and find those patients who should receive the vaccine because of existing health reasons such as COPD? Apparently most EMRs on the market wouldn't allow a physician to do that. Ours does. So that's what Dr. Hahn did yesterday. He ran a query to find those patients in the practice with certain health conditions that should prioritize them to receive the flu vaccine and called them up. It took a few minutes.

Compare that to the practice with paper charts. Have you ever seen a medical records room? It's a room with nothing but shelves and shelves, or cabinets and cabinets, of folders containing patient records. Can you imagine going through all those hundreds of records to find 50 patients to receive a vaccine? Would you bother? Probably not. Our EMR allows us to care. And that's what it's all about: a new way to practice old fashioned care.