Telemedical support for Iraq

The Swinfen Charitable Trust (SCT) provided two kinds of telemedical support to Iraq during 2004. Starting in January 2004, the Al-Yarmouk Teaching Hospital in Baghdad was able to refer cases into the well established global e-health network that the SCT has operated for the last five years. (In the first quarter of 2004, the SCT dealt with a total of 57 referrals from 15 hospitals in eight countries.) Two cases were referred from Baghdad in March 2004, both gynaecological, which were dealt with by consultants from the UK and Australia. The SCT administrators visited Basrah during April 2004 and met Iraqi doctors at the Shaibah Hospital as part of the international initiatives to improve health care there. Following this visit, the SCT network expanded to include another four hospitals in Iraq (Table 1). In addition, the SCT provided an electronic health records (EHR) system to support the rebuilding of maternity services, which has been led by the British Royal Colleges. The maternity records system is a Web-based EHR system, running on a secure server, which allows integrated access from antenatal clinics, from hospitals and from postnatal clinics in Iraq. Patients can view their own notes, thus promoting ownership of medical information, and doctors can view the notes of their own patients, from any Internet-connected PC. No special software is required by the user.

Observations in a maternity ward: Usability considerations for EHRs in an interrupt driven environment

With the increasing demand on healthcare systems it is imperative that all care is provided as efficiently and effectively as possible. Technology within the medical domain offers an exciting opportunity to augment work practices in order to meet these needs. This research project explores the implications of the interrupt-driven nature of work in clinical situations on documentation within an environment that increasingly involves electronic health records (EHRs). Midwives in a busy maternity ward were observed and interviewed about the work practices they employed to document information associated with patient care. The results showed that the interrupt-driven nature of the workplace, a feature common to many healthcare settings, led to a tension between the work and the work to document the work. Further, the IT environment in which the information was collected was not designed to cater for frequent interruption of the data entry process. Several recommendations for improving the IT environment are proposed to support health professionals in documenting patient data whilst attending to the interruptions. The recommendations include timeout screens, push technology, use of handheld PDAs, and cues to augment documentation in an interrupted session. Copyright © 2008 RMIT Publishing