| The transition from paper to electronic records may run the risk that much of the data will be lost. Donn Mukensnable at Convergence CT proffers a warning
The burning of the Great Library at Alexandria over 1600 years ago was a tragedy of epic proportions, not only for the works that we know were destroyed, but equally, for the unknown knowledge that remains forever lost. The keys to myriad mysteries may have perished on that ancient pyre.
Healthcare informatics is facing losses of a similar nature as the transition to electronic record keeping, and then to networked electronic health records, sweeps across the industry. While personal health records can hardly compare in value to Homer’s original manuscript of the Iliad, there is nevertheless hidden wealth in these medical histories.
Traditionally, doctors have kept their records on paper because it’s inexpensive, portable, easy to update, and can even provide a richer ‘information channel’ (due to colour, annotations and erasures) than computerised textual or coded entries. Charts are so much a part of a doctor’s regimen that it is no surprise that one of its most successful replacements has been a tablet and stylus. However, paper does have a downside. Not only is it fragile over archival timeframes and bulky to store in volume, written records are difficult to interpret electronically and, more importantly, to search. This places much more reliance on a practitioner’s memory.
The conversion of documents from paper to electronic form is costly; therefore value enters into the equation (although even if the transfer costs were nil, there would still be an inevitable loss of granularity and the potential for the introduction of errors). |
