By Jim Sack

Parkview Hospital has been intertwined in the history of my family since the 1950s, so over the years I have many fond memories and a few very sad ones from there. Mark Slen was a friendly childhood neighbor and historically one of the most important leaders of the hospital. As a young reported he gave me the grand tour. And, my lip was sown up there, my father died there, my grandchildren were born there. A few score other times I visited friends as they recovered or slipped away.

So, it was with a bit of frustration that I reiterated for a third or fourth time my mother’s medical history to a young nurse of indeterminate rank last Saturday as mom lay in a room recovering from a nasty virus. My mother, you see, has been there a lot over the past decade. She is 89 and no longer the robust, pushy, self-reliant woman she was as I grew up. She lay in the bed as the nurse asked me whether she had any heart problems. I snapped my head around, looked the nurse in the eye and said that mom had a heart attack in this hospital less than a year before. “Don’t you have a record of that?”

Nope, was the answer and the nurse asked the next few questions and ticked off my response, answers that they should already have had in their computer, available to doctors and nurses at a click of the mouse. Nope, no computer, no patient record system, no idea that your mother has ever been here before. Just a young nurse doing her bureaucratic duty to fill in a form that would be cursorily examined by someone, perhaps, and then chucked. Should mom find herself in another hospital bed in the same hospital tomorrow the same nurse would have to go through the same Q&A.
It just seems stupid…

…and dangerous.

Stupid is obvious. Key it in. Faster and permanent. It just makes sense to collect a history and use that history to help provide medical personnel information to paint a picture of the patient’s history and potential needs.

When seconds are critical, hospital personnel should be able to read a record that lists known allergies, lists whether a heart attack had been endured, notes whether insulin was part of the daily regimen, etc. The questions I answered were put to me a day after she had been stabilized in ER and many hours after she had been under care in her recovery room. They should have had that information from the git-go. When a life is at stake you want the doctors and nurses to be well informed, immediately, rather than shooting in the dark, or running unnecessary tests.

So, I answered the questions to the best of my knowledge, but my sister, who was not there, would have known more, and significantly more might have been gathered from a long, computerized, searchable, sortable history. Dr. Art Aiken, the now long-gone, long-time family doctor kept such a record on me with pages of inscriptions concerning mumps and measles and a dog bite when I was 14. I am sure he kept such a record on my mother, too. One would think that good ol’ Parkview, with all its professed commitment to patient care, with its great financial and human resources could do that, too. The technology is there. I think of this when the health care debate rages. There are certainly ways hospitals could do a better job, if they wanted to. The technology, afterall, is there.

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