Towards an Electronic Patient Record

The 15th annual Towards an Electronic Patient Record (TEPR) conference was organised by the Medical Records Institute (USA) and held 1-6 May at the Orlando Conference Center, Florida. The Center is enormous approximately 1.6km (l mile) long. The conference had up to 14 concurrent streams. The topics were wide-ranging and included: • re-engineering • transcription • security • medical terminology • identifying requirements • patient cards • selecting systems • legal issues • mental health • consumer access • speech technology • documentation • data warehousing • imaging • nursing issues • electronic signatures • IT trends • disaster recovery • cost / benefit analysis • user acceptance • telehealth • confidentiality and • implementation of electronic patient records. There were approximately 125 vendors' exhibits. Computer vendors showing their versions of the electronic patient record or associated hardware were in the majority. It was difficult to choose which sessions to attend. The breaks were the only common times in the program. Sometimes it was a matter of attending a session for a few minutes and trying to work out if it was going to be worthwhile. If it didn't look like the session would be informative, then it was a matter of sorting out if there was another to attend without walking in half way through the presentation. The Visionary Players entertained at the opening session. The Players did not actually meet each other before the conference. They developed the performance using email and telephone. The performance's Fiddler on the Roof theme featured songs that told the story of a clinician and his staff going through the stages required to successfully implement an electronic medical record (EMR). The session was very well done and informative as well as amusing. The performance was recorded and can be viewed at http://www.tepr.com/webcast The Clinical Documentation Challenge was a session where eight vendors of various EMR systems were invited to participate. The aim of the challenge was to show the audience how each system might handle the same information. Participants were given a limited amount of information before the Challenge. At the session a 'patient' presented her symptoms. Each vendor was given 10 minutes (which was strictly monitored) to show how their system could capture and display the information. The demonstration was interesting and enlightening. Free text versus structured data,