2011, Volume 4, Issue 2, pp 198 – 206

Optimizing the technological and informational relationship of the health care process and of the communication between physician and patient– Factors that have an impact on the process of diagnosis from the physician’s and the patient’s perspectives

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Authors and Affiliations

Correspondence to:Consuela–Madalina Petrescu, ‘Carol Davila’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania 8 Eroilor Sanitari Blvd, District 5, 050474, Bucharest ,e-mail consuela.gheorghe@medandlife.ro

Abstract

Objective: the optimization of a diagnosis process and fluency in the Health Care sector in Romania. A key to discover this complex process was to determine a correlation between the physicians and the use of information technology, on one side and the patients’ perspective on the other.

Hypothesis: Integrating information technology in a physician’s activity will lead to lower costs and less time spent while diagnosing patients. Using the electronic medical records and introducing a unified database with the patients’ medical histories will make the process of diagnosis easier.

Methods: We studied the diagnosis from the point of view of 304 patients in a public hospital and 320 physicians working there.

Results: We believed that time and accessibility to different physicians makes the diagnosis process a burden for a patient and implicitly lead to dissatisfaction with health care services. We supposed that the burden of diagnosis for physicians comes from the lack of Internet connection and computer usage knowledge. We have found out that most physicians know how to use the computer at an intermediate level and have access to Internet, online journals and databases and do not use emails to a higher extent to communicate to other specialists, but do not rely entirely on the electronic medical records. Most physicians think that it is not technology, which stands in the way of proper and fast diagnosis but the financing and the paper work from the Romanian health system. Solutions that might be taken into account to entirely motivate physicians to use electronic medical records are:

Adjustments can be made to the computer software interface in order to make the design more consistent (to eliminate the paper forms) and user friendly.

Physicians can be provided with more training and knowledge.

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About this article

PMC ID: 3124263
PubMed ID: 21776307
DOI: 

Article Publishing Date (print): 15-05-2011
Available Online: 25-05-2011

Journal information

ISSN Printing: 1844-122X
ISSN Online: 1844-3117
Journal Title: Journal of Medicine and Life

Copyright License: Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.


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