My ideas, part 1

During my neurology & psychiatry rotations the past few months, I had the habit of jotting down to-dos and thoughts into my Palm PDA. I also wrote ideas down, ideas that could improve healthcare or presented a problem that needed to be solved. Here's what I culled from mid-March until May, in chronological order:

1. Better manage hypoglycemia [or pathologically low blood glucose, a common effect in diabetics who take more medicine than needed] with a compliance tool to avoid stroke-like symptoms. (Esther Dyson, a noted "thinker" in the IT world, said whoever developed compliance tools for medications would be richly rewarded.)

2. Make diabetes care more humane and empower people with diabetes to live normal lives. One patient from a small Texas town was told by her endocrinologist that she ought not have a baby because her blood sugar was instable. This is untrue and bad medicine, and in her case prevented the woman from having her baby when she was younger [and being younger confers one definite advantage, lesser rates of birth defects].

3. If surgeons today use Da Vinci surgical robots to do mini-surgeries while they themselves are several feet from their patients and sometimes in different rooms while their staff wait at the patients' bedside, can't surgeons do this remotely?

4. Telemedicine allows doctors who don't need to conduct a thorough physical examination (think psychiatrists) -- or who have staff local to patients to do this for them -- to see patients far, far away from their own offices. Instead of focusing expensive incentives on bringing doctors and nurses to small towns and the countryside, let's build up telemedicine capabilities instead, which will be cheaper in the long-run and allow people more freedom to live where they'd like.

4. St. Luke's & Methodist, the two big Houston-area hospitals, use different Patient Management Records [PMR] systems vendors, McKesson and Hyperspace respectively. What happens if a patient is transferred between hospitals, or more likely if the patient comes to one hospital after having been hospitalized in another?

A layer of software could be constructed to draw patient data from both systems and displaying it on one interface, eliminating the need for re-entry of old data into each PMR system & improving medical persons' access to all the medical data out there on their patients. And this is a more feasible solution than getting all hospitals to buy from one vendor, or having them subscribe to a federal government invention.

That's it for now, future installments to follow.