Cutting Edge Issues

eHealth:
Towards A New World of Communications in Medicine

Case Study: Overlake Hospital Medical Center

Information on Demand: Consumer-Controlled Medical Records

Finding Leaders for Internet Health Care

Building the Security-Capable Enterprise

Planning Business Strategies with Internet Support

Internet Use as a Survival Strategy

Case Study Zone

Who is eMed?

Case Study: Overlake Hospital Medical Center, Bellevue, Wash.

Part 4

As a physician, I very much appreciate the importance of connectivity. Statistics concerning Internet use by physicians vary widely and may be unreliable, but it is claimed that 85% use the Internet, 70% have Internet access to their offices, and 33% use (or are willing to use) email to communicate with their patients. In my experience, the last figure is probably 3% to 5%, not 33%. Physicians are not embracing this because there is no reimbursement for it. It should be noted, however, that 64% of consumers say that they would like to correspond with their physicians via email. More important, 40% say that they would change physicians in order to find one who would communicate with them vie email.

Clearly, an Internet-enabled medical practice has benefits. When I arrived at Overlake Hospital in 1995, it had no intranet and no Internet access. There were a couple of guys in the basement in our information services department, and they were starting to tinker with Internet use. Together, we though about what physicians needed and decided that what they needed was information. As we had limited cash available for an Internet project, we wondered if we could link our legacy system to the Web so that physicians could have inexpensive access to information anywhere in the world. Our first step was to get our in-house patient-care information system to run in a Web browser. It accomplished our objective in making information available; but the graphical interface was not intuitive, and it took a fair amount of training to use it.

The next step was to take the same information and display it in something that looks and functions just like a medical chart that our doctors use everyday. Overlake Hospital was among the first hospitals in the United States to do this. We developed WebChart, a browser interface to live information from the hospital’s information system. It is an easy-to-use, point-and-click system. Anything that meets a Health Level 7 standard and resides in the hospital information system can be accessed through WebChart, and the cost of this system has been minimal. We are now working on a model that will allow us to offer this kind of technology to other hospitals that want a pay-as-you-go plan.

I am very proud of the team that made WebChart possible, and of the fact that Overlake Hospital was noted by Hospitals and Health Networks as one of the 100 most wired hospitals. Of course we were; we have to be, in our environment, but many other hospitals will be joining us in the new world of care on the Internet.