Paperless hospital speeds medical care

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Baby Riley Matthews wheezed noisily on the exam table. “He’s belly-breathing,” the emergency-room doctor said worriedly — Riley’s little abdomen was markedly rising and falling with each breath, a sign of respiratory distress.

In most emergency rooms, the doctor would grill Mom: Has he ever been X-rayed? Do you remember what it showed? But in the new all-digital Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, doctors just clicked on a COW — a “computer on wheels” that rolls to each patient’s side. Up popped every test and X-ray the 6-month-old has ever had.

This is the eerily paperless hospital of the future, what the “electronic medical record” that President Barack Obama insists will transform what health care looks like.

No chart full of doctors’ scribbles hanging on the bed. No hauling around envelopes full of X-rays. No discharge with a prescription slip. Even the classic ER patient list has changed from the white-board of TV-drama fame to a giant computer screen.

By the best count, only 1.5 percent of the nation’s roughly 6,000 hospitals use a comprehensive electronic record.

Even that statistic belies how hard it will be for health care to jettison its 19th-century filing system by 2014, the federal government’s goal — despite the $19 billion that the economic stimulus package is providing to help doctors start.

It took Children’s seven hard years and more than $10 million to evolve a system that lets its doctors check on patients with a few mouse clicks from anywhere and use speedily up-to-date records in directing their care.

“Sometimes before I even see the ER patient, the X-ray is in here and finished and read,” said Dr. Jonathan Bickel, the ER attending physician who whipped out his laptop to check on Riley’s overnight stay. Not too long ago, “I had to take mom’s word for it.”

Look, he pointed: An outpatient lung specialist tested Riley for cystic fibrosis just before his mother brought the 6-month-old to the emergency room. The specialist’s detailed exam notes hit the ER computer in hours, not the days it takes to transcribe into a paper chart. Cystic fibrosis didn’t cause his wheezing, and other tests were ordered.