Transcript

Catastrophe and Health IT

Dr. Benjamin: I needed to find a way to deliver good-quality health care to people who didn’t have a lot of money, and so I needed to find cost-efficient ways and then the Hurricane Katrina came. But, because of experience, I knew that we had to get everything out of there within 48 hours, or it would mildew and we’d lose the ceiling, we’d lose the roof and everything.

Prior to that, we had always said, "I’d like to have electronic records, so that if we ever have a hurricane again, we’d have it." But they were unaffordable. And then when I walked in and saw this, I was just devastated. And I was like, "I wish we had had electronic records," because my employees had said, "we don’t want to dry out records anymore in the sun.” And we’ve got to do it again, because the previous time, we had turned them over and the sun is, like, baking and cooking them, drying them out, trying to make sure they didn’t fade. I even use waterproof ink. To this day, I use waterproof ink.

We spent a lot of time. We spent as much time on the records as we did on the building, trying to dry them out. And even when we opened the building back, we put them in a file cabinet and tried to make sure they were in a metal cabinet. That way, they’d be safe if something happened. Then, New Year’s Eve night, the fire happened, and we lost everything. So all those records we had dried out, we had saved then burned. And so then I was determined, we’ve got to have electronic records. There’s no way we can’t.

This kind of tells me everything about the patient, the entire medical record. One of the neatest things, I think, about it is the fact that I can pull up all of her medications. It’ll tell me I’ve got interactions and to be careful, that these medicines will interact with each other. The yellow is a slight one, where these are a little more serious. The red ones are very serious.

I’d like to be able to use it to improve the care that I give patients. For example, I’d like to pull all - just click a button and say, "you haven’t had your mammogram. It’s due in two days, so you need to get in here." Things that I would have to pull every paper chart before to find that out, and now I can do it with the touch of a button.