The Wall Street Journal looks at how patients are confused when leaving the ER room. That can happen easily as many ER Rooms are extremely busy today. One suggestion is to try to write down some key information, or in some instances, some ER Rooms will print information for you, and one other idea that will continue to evolve, is the 
PHR, and some day perhaps all the information can be shared with either a PHR like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault before you leave. This way you would have all your information in a central place and can refer to it later, once the haze of being at the ER diminishes. BD
More information on Personal Health Records is listed on the reference column of this site. BD
They also found that some 80% of patients who had comprehension deficits thought they had understood everything. That means simply asking patients if they understand won’t be enough to improve the problem. “Most patients appear to be unaware of their lack of understanding,” the authors write, “and report inappropriate confidence in their comprehension and recall.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/16/emergency-room-patients-unclear-on-doctors-instructions/
PHR will not solve the problem of those patients, that are curiously the kind of patients that will not be able to use Internet.
ReplyDeletePHRs need to be designed thinking about patients needs, not IT or doctors needs.
Keyose.com the first totally anonymous personal health record services hope to become that kind of "patient focused" PHR.