VA Hospitals Excerpts

"The centerpiece of that culture is VistA, the VA's much praised electronic medical-records system. Every office visit, prescription, and medical procedure is recorded in its database, allowing doctors and nurses to update themselves on a patient's status with just a few keystrokes. In 1995, patient records at VA hospitals were available at the time of a clinical encounter only 60% of the time. Today they are 100% available. Some 96% of all prescriptions and medical orders, such as lab tests, are now entered electronically. The national comparison is more like 8%. "One out of five tests in a civilian hospital have to be repeated because the paper results are lost," says Veterans Affairs Secretary R. James Nicholson. "That's not happening in our hospitals." VistA is a big reason why the VA has held its costs per patient steady over the past 10 years despite double-digit inflation in health-care prices. "


"At the hospital pharmacy, prescriptions are doled out by robotic devices -- one reason the organization is able to hold co-pays at $8. Each bottle of medicine carries a bar code that is scanned by the computer. If a patient is allergic or takes a conflicting drug, the system will sound an alarm. Similar bar codes are affixed to patient ID bracelets to protect against the wrong patient getting a procedure, a common mixup in hospitals."

Very cutting edge! This makes the co-pay dirt cheap and patients will love it. I don't know what kind of robotics they are using but Microsoft just started a new robotics initiative and have a development kit freely available.

"He meets with an elderly man with severe asthma, takes a quick look at his electronic records, and learns that the patient has not yet had a pneumonia shot. That's a big issue at the VA. The organization has cut hospitalizations by 4,000 patients a year since its pneumonia vaccination rate went from 29% in 1995 to 94% last year."

Excellent I like how they build some prevention into the system.

But to keep patients from developing diabetes in the first place, the VA offers overweight patients the opportunity to join a weight-management program that pairs them with a nutritionist. Few insurers will pay for such prevention in a civilian setting. To Sanderson, preventive care is just one reason he is sure the changes at the VA "have saved thousands of lives over the years."

Awesome! I am very passionate about this stuff. Even patients with adult onset diabetes should be offered the same thing. Being as adult onset diabetes has been proven to be reversible through natural ways, and won't be cured through a magic pill, becuase its typically caused by many years of poor nutrition or obesity . Clinics should offer this kind of service in addition to the diabetes drug.

This is a link to a CNN article abot the VA. Same thing w/ some different interesting stuff.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/15/8376846/

"As part of the overhaul, he reengineered the VA's $1-billion-a-year pharmacy, creating a single list of approved medications. To free up pharmacists and to reduce errors, each hospital pharmacy installed systems to automatically refill prescriptions. Today, at the Manhattan VA, the robot-like Optifill system dispenses 1,000 prescriptions a day."

When they found out that Vista is an "open source" program that's available for no charge over the Internet, they used a Freedom of Information Act request to get the code from the government and launched Medsphere. For a fee, Medsphere installs a proprietary version of Vista - called OpenVista - and provides round-the-clock customer support.

Kizer is in for a hard slog. He concedes that many hospital executives are reluctant to put their patients' lives in the hands of "a nascent startup with a disruptive technology." And big companies such as General Electric (Research), McKesson (Research), and Cerner (Research) all offer their own computerized clinical systems with electronic health records. So far Medsphere has about six customers, including Midland Memorial Hospital in Texas, that are offering OpenVista at 60 facilities.