Coming to grips with EHR records: What would TV's House do?

Thursday, February 18, 2010
By Stephen Strauss, Special to CBC News

WojtekMichalowski.JPG

Wojtek Michalowski
Full Professor
Director of MSc in Health Systems
Telfer School of Management

"Over the past few months, I have embarked on a somewhat quixotic enterprise to help ordinary people understand why adopting electronic health records has been so difficult. I have been trying to convince people close to the TV medical show House to create an episode in which lead character Gregory House and a new hospital EHR system square off to see who gives the best diagnoses."

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"To get a sense of what might underlie such a drama, I went to the University of Ottawa and sat down with Wojtek Michalowski, a professor at the Telfer School of Management. Michalowski and his compatriots, in what is known as the MET (Mobile Emergency Triage) research group, have been developing what is technically known as "clinical decision support systems" for emergency departments."

"The MET concept is that information about a patient's symptoms, previous medical history, age and other existing conditions would be entered into a computer. Software would compare the data to known causes, and suggest possible diagnoses and treatments to the ER doctors."


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