Florida Anesthesia Computer and Engineering Team
©
University of Florida, 1996
The development of electronic medical records has been a frustrating one for many physicians. Faced with enormous amounts of data, coupled with tremendous backlogs in the typical medical records department, the physician saw the computer as offering two major advantages: 1. the ability to "remember" enormous amounts of information 2. the ability to spit it out quickly and legibly when requested. Getting these two advantages into a usable format, however, has been difficult. Medicine has been one of the later players in the information revolution. Michael O'Rourke in 1975 wrote:
A banker or business man who may marvel at the modern technology of coronary care would be surprised indeed to find that his medical colleagues have such a poor knowledge of past results that they still cannot decide if anticoagulants are good or band, whether digitalis is valuable or dangerous, or whether isoprenaline more harm than good in cardiac power failure. The man of commerce has come to rely on sophisticated methods of data storage, retrieval and analysis in order to sell soap, while his medical counterpart relies on incomplete data in a forgetful mind, beset with bias and emotion to use powerful therapeutic tools in the treatment of patient who are, potentially at least, dangerously ill.
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