Technology of medical records and transcription

For this week's assignment, I interviewed my mom, who felt that electronic databases were the most important information technologies for her job.

Starting in the early 90's, the medical records and transcription department of St. Joseph's hospital in Hillsboro started using computers with a DOS OS. Soonafter, they invested in an electronic patient information and billing database published by the Dairyland Healthcare Systems, a company based in Minnesota (later merged to create Healthland).

My mother felt the new system wasn't overly difficult to master, although it had many facets so they were constantly learning new things about how to use it, and they also received good IT support from Dairyland to ease the process. The hospital had mandated intensive training about a month prior to the implementation of the new IT system (though I'm not sure if she was talking about the Dairland one or a more recent system), and there were consultants around the department for a bit after the implementation, kind of like reverse job shadowing to help the new users learn.

She feels that her workplace is much more productive because patient's informaton is " at our
fingertips", instead of having to physically go to each individual department, like medical records or accounting, in order to track down hard copies of a patient's files. In more recent years, their electronic database structures have expanded to integrate medical records, accounts information, and demographics, to make their system even more efficient.

As an interesting side note, she mentioned that St. Joseph's in Hillsboro has linked their computer systems with UW-Madison's radiology department, which allows them to send radiographic images to experts at UW-Madison, who are then able to examine the images and respond in as little as half an hour.

My mom said it can be a frustrating experience to work while IT staff are working the bugs out of a system, but she's never had to do transcription the more cumbersome "old-fashioned" way, so overall she felt like the electronic database technology has allowed her job to be more enjoyable.

One final thing she noted is that, within the next four years, she predicts then-President Obama will mandate these kinds of electronic database systems in medical care businesses across the board, to save on the cost (in time and money) of using paper files, and to streamline medical records and processing of medical dealings.