Patient Handouts at the Point of Care
My Primary Care Physician is a good guy. His practice implemented an EMR a few years ago- each time I see him, I ask him how that’s going and he lets me see how it looks on the tablet PC he carries into the exam room.
My last visit was for an annual checkup a few weeks ago and we were talking about point-of-care tools and integration with his EMR. It turns out that their EMR has no useful functionality to help find or produce patient education handouts he can quickly sent to a printer
I told him it would not be difficult to make a tool that would enable him to find authoritative handouts quickly and easily from the paid resources his practice has available, and he expressed interest in that idea.
He hasn’t followed up, but I found the idea interesting, so I started thinking about what sort of tool could be built for this purpose that could be integrated into any EMR using only patient handouts that are available at no cost on the Web.
With that in mind, I came up with a Google Custom Search Engine for use by providers at our hospital, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be used by any institution or practice.
The idea behind this is that any search result is not only authoritative, but that it is within a click of a “print” button.
There are built-in refinements for large print, pediatrics, Spanish language, Seniors, and low literacy.
Internists and medical libraryfolk: I’d be grateful for your feedback!
