I am attending two hospitals in Waterford and Dublin, both requiring images of various portions of my body, each prescribing treatments for different ailments and illnesses. Neither hospital, for technical reasons I'm told, can share images with the other. Yet I can take the images from either location, export them onto an external medium and take them to my computer at home for viewing. The hospitals have refused to accept my offer of assistance in getting the images from one place to the other, quoting variously, GDPR, technical difficulties, the potential for virus infections passing between sites, and other nonsense as the reasons they cannot accept my offers. I haven't had any of my computers or devices on my home network shut down by hackers any time recently or in the past. It's a bit more than they can say.
I could even take the images, compress them with zero loss of image quality so they are "emailable" (the files tend to be very large), speed the entire process up and eliminate all the manual interventions, transcriptions and errors. I have offered to demo what I can do and the savings I could achieve, but GDPR apparently prevents me from using images taken of me for demonstration purposes.
At the moment, images taken in one hospital are used to produce a textual report dictated by a local expert that is typed up and forwarded in hard copy form to the other location. One such report, based on my images, read to me by a doctor in one hospital at my request, specifies queries about the "2nd rib, R/H side" but fails to specify front or back ribs. There were other Es&Os in the same report. She seemed as shocked as I was at just how bad the report was. Other such errors and inconsistencies are common, based on access to my own records.
It is not uncommon for admitting doctors to show up with no notes and expect me to give a full medical history off the cuff and to dictate a full, up-to-date list of my medicines. All of this information is already stored in multiple HSE patient and medication databases, tied together by my PPSN or Medical Card number, but, as neither number is used as a reference in any hospital system (there are multiple such systems in each HSE area, each having its own unique patient reference) there is no way of accessing that existing information locally, and no way of tying the different reference numbers to one patient. I could do this easily as I've done something eerily similar for a vary large European financial institution.
For each hospital appointment or consultation, I now carry with me in typed form, information on all of my medications and hospital admissions and hand them to the admitting physician for them to staple to my notes. Invariable they manually transcribe the printed information in medic scrawl to their blank note sheets and hand me back my clear printed documents.
Here at home, my pharmacist, my GP, and I have informally agreed to a protocol to keep my medication lists up to date, to forward renewals from GP to the pharmacist, and to request monthly call-offs from the pharmacist to me. During lock-down, this reduced the number of physical visits to different premises, sped the processes up, and generally improved the effectiveness and efficiency of information and medication flow amongst and between us.
The HSE is a dinosaur, a disaster area, and point solutions like those mentioned in the podcast are just fiddling at the edges while the entire system heads for a total meltdown. Work practices must change, against the wishes of any and all of the unions or other vested interests. They've had their day. It's now past time the HSE focussed on patients.
Last week in a Dublin hospital I was being transported between the admission/prep areas and the area where my treatment was to take place. As I was on a trolley, the porter escorting me had to use the lift. Several lifts arrived at our floor but we were refused admission as the lifts were filled with suits wearing hospital ID tags and lanyards as well as uniformed staff, doctors, nurses, HCAs, and admins. The lift doors are clearly labeled, "PATIENT USE ONLY". The porters escorting me and a patient in a wheelchair remarked as yet another lift departed our floor with no patients on board, "So much for putting patients first and having them at the forefront of our work."
It's like the notion, purely a notion" of St Vincent's University Hospital being a smoke-free campus; it probably is if you ignore the dozens of taxi drivers, staff, patients, and visitors smoking outside the main entrance and across the road at the benches near the little bus stop. Strangely, while ash bins are supplied in a smoke-free campus, no one bothers to use them for their designated purpose. The entrance is ankle-deep in cigarette butts, ash, discarded drinks bottles, sweet wrappers, and other detritus.
Just like the idea of technological innovation, the HSE's notion of rules and regulations and implementing or adhering to them is purely notional.
I'll be back with more