One of the major projects ongoing at Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare is “Telling the Patient Story”. While discrete, structured data (sometimes referred to as “codified” data) are very important for clinical decision support functionality such at drug-drug interaction checking, allergy checking, and drug-disease interaction checking, there will always be a place, at least I hope, for a narrative of the patient’s story and a narrative of physicians’ thought processes in the electronic health record. To meet the needs of “Big Data”, there is coming technology that allows the computer to interpret free text. We at MLH will be moving more and more clinicians to Dynamic Documentation over the next 12-24 months. I’ve used it since April of 2014, including in its infancy, and it is a major leap forward over ClinNote and Powernote, and will be the focus of future development of clinical documentation both at Cerner and at MLH. Tap on the link below to read more about how digitizing is resulting in the loss of some of those intimate connections with have with patients and the connection we make in our clincal decision making.
In summary, do we need structured data or narrative data? The answer is “yes”.
As hospitals go digital, human stories get left behind.
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