STREAMLINING THE EMERGENCY ROOM - TEXTUAL ETL

STREAMLINING THE EMERGENCY ROOM

By W H Inmon

The emergency room of the hospital is where people turn to when they have a serious problem with their health. In most hospitals the emergency room is considered to be the most fast paced, challenging place to work. (My wife is a retired emergency room doctor. I know first hand about all of this.) People die in the emergency room. It is like television drama except that it is real.

Emergency room doctors are under great stress. The decisions they make on the fly will affect people the rest of their lives. Emergency room doctors are at the center of the health of people, total strangers. In a word, the emergency room doctor needs all the help they can get. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

One of the first actions that an emergency room doctor has to do upon the encounter of a new patient is to understand the medical history of the patient. The past medical history of the patient gives the doctor information about the treatment of the patient. The doctor needs to understand both the structured information in the medical record and the text, unstructured information that is found in the medical record.

Some medical records are not too long. Some medical records are really lengthy. In a conversation with an emergency room doctor we are told that it takes from 10 minutes to 30 minutes to carefully examine the records. Once the doctor understands the patient's history, the doctor is prepared to commence with treatment.

Enter textual ETL. Textual ETL can read the text in a medical record.

Textual ETL can read text and find important information in the medical record. For lack of a better term textual ETL does triage on the text found in the medical records. And what takes a doctor 20 minutes on the average to do for a patient is done in a few short seconds with textual ETL.

For all practical purposes, the triage done by textual ETL on a record is instantaneous.

The savings are truly worthwhile. First off, the emergency room doctors time is saved – twenty minutes per patient. Every patient. This frees the doctor up to be a doctor, not a manuscript reader. More time with the patient. More time administering health rather than reading about it.

A second real advantage is that some patients arrive at the emergency room needing immediate life and death treatment. Even waiting 20 minutes may be life endangering for these kinds of patients.

The ability to do medical record triage on the text of a patient’s medical records is a compelling case for making the life and the practice of medicine better and more efficient in the emergency room.

There is a short video that you can watch with Bill Inmon and Dr Hightower, a medical doctor in the emergency room. Among other things, there is a demonstration of the usage of textual ETL being used on a patient’s medical record. The video is about 45 minutes long, and if you are interested in making emergency medicine more efficient and making the job of the doctor less stressful, you need to watch this short video.

?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SF8mlHc_BM

There are many other advantages to using Textual ETL in the emergency room and I'll be releasing additional articles shortly to provide more detail on the financial, legal and holistic benefits.

Bill Inmon lives in Denver with his wife and his three Scotty dogs – Jeb, Lena, and Rollie. Rollie is still a pup but he is learning from Jeb and Lena what the rules of the house are.