Blogged at 4/12/2015, 11:50 (edited at 20:50)
Hello, my name is Jungsuk Yum. I'm a MBA candidate at Johns Hopkins Carey business school and majored in bioengineering in my undergraduate years and worked at investment banks in Seoul. I'm highly interested in hospital services because Johns Hopkins University has the No.1 hospitals in the world.
I'll explain about a brief history and current situation of the influences of ICT on hospitals services and the ways how hospital should the ICT for more advanced customers' services. Indeed, the hospitals' operations and their services for patients have developed along with an advance in ICT. I believe there still remain many areas where hospitals should go in the future, and I would like to share my ideas with you.
Today, I'll focus on the past. Because of ICT, three things became hard to be seen in hospitals.
1. Three disappearances in hospitals
(1) Disappearance of slips :
OCS (Order Communication System)
Before a computer system had been adopted in hospitals, doctors had to write prescriptions and delivered to nurses, then the nurses explained about examinations or medicines to patients again. At that time, we call the prescription 'slip'.
However, after a computer system was established in hospitals, the prescriptions got to be delivered via an automatic system without papers. In other words, we describe the OCS as "the slips were disappeared in the hospitals.
(2) Disappearance of charts :
EMR (Electronic Medical Record)
When patients visit hospitals, doctors checked and recorded the patients' conditions on their charts with a pen. In the past, doctors and patients had to wait until the paper chart to arrive to them, which was very time-consuming. However, at present, patients can enter to the doctor's room without delay due to the paper chart. This is thanks to the EMR system. The EMR system allowed doctors to record patient's conditions on computers and save them in main computer in hospitals. Therefore, EMR led the disappearance of charts in hospitals.
(3) Disappearance of films :
PACS (Picture Archiving Communication System)
Even a few decades ago, there was no devices which could connect digitized patients' visualized records, including X-rays, CT, and MRI among each computer. Namely, there was no network system among computers for visual materials. At that time, staffs at hospitals had to deliver patients' film itself between departments and save it for records. On the other hand, now they don't need to do so because PACS allowed those films to transfer via inner-network system. Thus, PACS created the third one, the disappearance of films in hospitals.
