AMDIS/HIMSS: No doc 'plays with a full deck'

NEW ORLEANS—“We’re all playing with half a deck,” said Lawrence L. Weed, MD, the father of the problem-oriented medical record, speaking during the AMDIS Physicians’ IT Symposium at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference.

Weed, professor of medicine emeritus at the College of Medicine, University of Vermont in Burlington, Vt., quoted everyone from Francis Bacon to Oscar Wilde during his talk. “No two doctors play with the same part of the deck and no one plays with a full deck,” he said about health information.

Also, Weed expressed surprise that the Institute of Medicine’s estimate that 500,000 people a year die due to medical errors, hasn’t caused more outrage. In an age when a plane crash makes the evening news for several days, Weed said the medical industry should be more concerned about its preventable errors. “We’re in the dark ages when it comes to moving information.”

One of the problems, he said, is that “medicine is a $2.5 trillion industry with no accounting system.”

The transportation system, meanwhile, works because the knowledge is in the system not in people’s heads. “Always teach a core of behavior, not a core of knowledge, as knowledge is forgotten,” he said.