By Derek Gower, Managing Director, Houston Medical
As it is Christmas I thought I should start with trees and pose the question, does software save trees?!
Well, not Christmas trees according to an interview on this morning’s radio. One supplier had received orders for 3000 genuine carbon sucking Christmas trees. The point of the discussion was, would it have been more environmentally friendly to have sold plastic ones?! Should our Christmas tree supplier been made to purchase carbon credits to offset the trees he was felling and should the plastic supplier feel guilty for depleting the world's ever vanishing oil supplies. Plastic tress or real ones, what does the Kyoto agreement say?
Bah Humbug! Such is the moral dilemma of living in the 21st century!
At a recent practice managers conference in Hobart I had discussions with one of our clients who was sending out 200 letters per day from a large urology practice. We quickly calculated that was worth at least $300 per day for stamps envelopes and ink and that did not include a carbon offset for the postman’s van! And all before labour costs had been taken into account. Before the advent of software it would take several car driving typists to turn out 200 letters per day. Word processing came with computers, the task was now easy, down came the trees and up went the paper. But wait, there’s good Christmas cheer, with electronic referral, status and discharge, costs get slashed, trees live to do what they have evolved to do and 200 messages still get sent.
I recall 10 years ago when Houston introduced electronic lab results in Hamilton New Zealand. A floppy disk was included in the courier bag along with the paper copies. Not only did the doctor tell me that he now had a reason to put a computer on his desk, now, ten years later, at least in NZ, 98% of results never get printed, they are all electronically transmitted. I hope early in 2008 200 letters per day from one urology clinic will be consigned to history along with golf ball typewriters. Here is our bit for the environment, let's make 2008 the year of the electronic referral, status and discharge summary, Houston is ready, are you? Over this last year we have worked with CNS, Argus and HealthLink to bring the dream of reduced paper to reality. With our most recent installation, in a brand new purpose built building for Hobart Eye Surgeons, the architect was instructed NOT to provide significant space for patient files. The future is here.
I seem to have travelled a lot this year and while reading the QANTAS in flight magazine I saw an article on the original Kangaroo route from Sydney to London. 60 years ago this month Qantas flew 29 passengers, attended by 11 crew to London. It took 96 hours, had five stops and cost half the price of the average Sydney house to get there! Presumably the other half to get back! (Imagine the postcard, have seen The Changing Of The Guard mum, sorry about the house!)
Even though in 2007 300 passengers appear to be looked after by three attendants and an unknown number upfront, can we do even better by staying at home and making better use of the web. Notwithstanding the fact that according to Yahoo the most searched for web article in 2007 was Britney Spears, at Houston we have completely overhauled our website. In the New Year there will be demonstrations, a user forum and our new VIP.NET program for all to view, but sorry, despite requests, I had to say no to Britney!
For our NZ GP doctors the major development has been the implementation of CVD Diabetes as required by the MOH and Best Practice from the work done with Prof Murray Tillyard’s team in Dunedin. Houston has completed all existing stages and these will be rolled out as soon as sign off has been received from the MOH.
We have also introduced Houston OnLine. This allows smaller clinics to use a subscription based service. For a small monthly fee we will do all the computer work for you. The backups, software upgrades, letter templates and reports. All done on our server. Depending on demand we are considering offering a full service and allowing accountants to also dial in and if you wish, do such routine things as paying wages etc. Can’t justify a full time practice manager? Call Justin, he may have the answer. A Hamilton orthopaedic surgeon already has.
For the South Australian Division of General Practice Houston completed a trial of SNOMED CT incorporated into Houston VIP. The results were presented at a health informatics conference in Brisbane in August. In a further SA initiative Dr Brian Symon, a well known GP in Adelaide has opened a practice with VIP in Dubai. We hope this will be the beginning of many more in that oil rich country.
Also in SA VIP equipped cardiology practices continue to multiply and it may not be too extravagant a claim to suggest that Houston is at the heart, (sorry!) of most cardiology consultations in that wine and uranium blessed state.
In physiotherapy Houston was pleased to sponsor the recent Sports Medicine conference in home town Hamilton. We continue to be by far the largest supplier of Allied Health software in NZ. With existing practices expanding, new ones joining we continue to introduce new features and work closely with the ACC.
VIP.Net The result of around six man years work was installed three months ago in Dr Doug Cox’s practice in Hamilton. According to Practice manager Kylie all is functioning well. For the techies this is a completely new product built on an SQL data base using C# as a .Net application. For the user this will mean more features, better word processing, greater standardisation, better reporting and with the SQL database, be more forgiving of hardware and network faults.
Houston present at RANZCO 2007
For ophthalmology clients Cam Hawke of Carl Zeiss advises that Houston is the first company to incorporate the new Zeiss VISUPAC software into a PMS. This was first demonstrated at RANZCO in Perth and allows for a seamless import of all VISUPAC images. We have also done the same for Digital Healthcare and many other suppliers. We have worked on this project for some years now but, sorry team..... it seems that a moth may have done it better! Read On......
A scientist who successfully connected a moth's brain to a robot predicts that "hybrid" computers running a combination of technology and living tissue will be available in 10 to 15 years. (Remember only 10 years ago, it was electronic lab results that changed the way doctors worked.)
The move to use the moth came after Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the University of Arizona estimated the cost of building a computer chip that could process visual images like a brain would likely cost US$60,000 to build. "At that price, I thought I was getting lower quality than if I was just accessing the brain of an insect, which costs, well, ... considerably less”. (Moth food instead of atomic power stations? But, a problem, don't moths eat trees?)
Apparently Higgins built a 12 inch high robot driven by the brain of a moth and stated, “This is just the seed of what can be done when combining living tissue with computer components, but warned "There's the possibility, “when you start to tap into brains, for all sorts of evil applications." Now there’s a thought for the New Year!!
New Zealand
Australia
