When New Technology in Healthcare Industry Goes Wrong

In a society obsessed with the latest gadget, innovative technology continues to take center stage. Society has become more reliant on technology for the most basic of tasks. From communication to writing, technology is shaping personal interacts. For the healthcare industry, technology has improved personal care drastically over the last century. But what happens when reliance on technology gets in the way of care, especially in a hospital?

Unfortunately, this happens. My friend's grandmother, who lives in Florida, was put into a hospital after learning that her health was quickly deteriorating. After having suffered a serious fall, she was to undergo intense surgery. Upon my friend's arrival, she noticed a drastic change in hospital procedure: everything became computerized. The hospital treating her grandmother had decided to forgo all handwritten files in favor of "a new computerized system designed to reduce medical errors and speed up patient care." Her entire family, especially her grandmother, had become subjects in an experiment. In reality what her family experienced was implementation at its worse.


All around the hospital, or at least on her grandmother's ICU, IT support helped hospital staff utilize the new technology. Unfortunately all the IT support and hospital staff could not effectively use the devices. As my friend told me, "it was as if they never had training, anytime anything had to get done it took a really long time." Continuously the system received errors and was forced to be shut down or the work had to be restarted. Of course none of this is the fault of the staff but an implementation strategy gone wrong. Although the program is supposed to eliminate human errors, it fell to take in account, in fact, human errors. The staff may have not received adequate education, especially for real-life situations. The current patients in the hospital did not receive the superior care promised by the president and chief executive officer of the hospital.

The reason behind the switch is valid: less mistakes in the drug ordering process but what are patients losing? Now doctors can place orders directly into the electronic medical record, eliminating paper, reducing errors, and decreasing the amount of time elapsed between order and care. Realistically what happened this first week were doctors refusing to sign off on prescriptions. My friend's grandmother had doctors refuse to write the prescription, nurses running around like their heads were cut off, and ultimately feeling the loss of care. For doctors willing to sign off, they do not even have to leave their desk; the system is computerized from anywhere that has access to the dedicated servers. The company and hospital report a change in physician behavior resulting in improved patient care thanks to declining contact with the nurses and patients. There were fewer mistakes because the physicians did not have to clarify anything with the nurse which seems scarier than safer. The new system seems to reject the check and balance system.

However, this is not the scariest part. The new system requires an ID bracelet with bar codes. As my friend reported, "each time the nurse would scan the bar code it would beep causing my grandmother to wake up... she was in a lot of pain and this just upset her." The bar code system is subject to misreads and errors leaving patients in a vulnerable spot. When my friend told me this all I could picture was the movie Idiocracy. This comedy is becoming more a true story every day. In the movie the citizens are identified by bar codes tattooed on their skin. Further the hospitals are all mandated by a click of a button. The bar code system made this grandmother wake up constantly irritated, not to mention the robotic feeling she must have felt.

Don't get me wrong, this system has strong, viable reasons. All the patient files will have to be hosted in a HIPAA compliant data center. This means that the data received through this paper-free strategy will be as secure as possible. The redundancy required to be HIPAA compliant guarantees 100% uptime. With dedicated servers housed in a data center, the patient and hospitals files will be safe from natural disasters and downtime. This new computerization of hospital procedure has benefits such as less drug order errors and a secure hosting solution for their data. But do the patients feel more secure or has technology eliminated yet another personal interaction. The decision is up to you.