Lessons learned from Katrina, 9/11, SARS, and other disasters
Another question?
Q: Hi. This is Ron Kahnfrom Boston again. I thought that some of the comments that Dr. DeBoisblanc made were very important and I wanted to follow up with both him and the rest of the panel about other issues that relate to people who are on medications or have medical problems.
So two things that haven't been addressed, and they're somewhat related, are what was your experience with medical records and what would be your recommendations about trying to help make medial records more available? And then I guess my second one, which is somewhat related – is related also, as I mentioned earlier in the earlier panel, to the health insurance industry, which once you get beyond that first few days of crisis, will also play a role in some decision making around healthcare in many places. I'd be happy for your thoughts and experience on this.
SHUTE: Okay. Who wants to try – tackle medical records? Any thoughts there?
DEBOISBLANC: I'll be happy to tell you what happened. I'm not sure I know what should happen, but for one time we were glad we didn't have an electronic medical record. We had a paper medical record in this old hospital and we were able - what we did is we taped some medical records – put them in a plastic bad and taped them to the forearm of our patients. So wherever they wound up, the medical records wound up with them. A national, electronic medical record would alleviate some of the problems of using an electronic medical record because I'm absolutely sure that if we had had one, we wouldn't been able to print a hard copy, and you wouldn't have been able to access that copy from outside, so we would have had nothing. But fortunately that didn't happen to us. I'd be interested to hear from some of the other hospitals in the region that did have electronic medical records and what they did.
SHUTE: And Isaac, do you have any plans or issues as far as electronic medical records in New York?
WEISFUSE: Well, you know, it's an issue that we are working on. We have a - it's not quite the same but we have a system that the New York State Department of Health has pioneered called HERDS, which allows us to look at hospital utilization and resources on a moment-to-moment basis to help us manage the healthcare system but that doesn't get to the individual level.
SHUTE: Okay. And I can say, just having been down to New Orleans, and talking to CEOs of the hospitals there, they are in a huge cash crunch right now. Each hospital is losing millions of dollars a month taking care of the uninsured and so far the dollars from state and federal sources are not flowing to them. So I can say they're definitely having a hard time down there. Thank you very much.
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