Douglas Blayney, M.D.'s Page

John Cox invited me to his Texas Oncology Practice at the Methodist Charlton Cancer Center in Dallas, to talk about multidisciplinary breast cancer clinics. After lunch, which was attended by most of the practice’s oncologists, John showed me his iKnowmed EHR. The iKnowmed product has changed since we first used it in October, 2000 at Wils

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An article by Schiff and Bates, writing in the March 25th New England Journal of Medicine, here caught my attention. They make some suggestions to answer the question, "Can electronic clinical documentation help prevent diagnostic errors?" They start with the premise that "electronic prescribing appears to reduce the rate of medication errors, but the other benefits of electronic records are less clear," and

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I arranged to spend last Thursday afternoon with Peter Yu, at his El Camino Real office of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). PAMF has largely implemented EPIC as their EHR, and as Peter and I had an ASCO-related conference call scheduled, I was going to take the call with him and observe his EHR in action. The call was canceled, but he had three patients whom he had set up to see.

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We're beginnning implementation of our Eclypsis CPOE in our Cancer Center (see here). Our system does not come with pre-built order sets, so we're in the process of building our own. We're trying to balance patient safety (no overdoses, missed meds, etc), efficiency (which I define as the fewest clicks by the ordering physician consonant with the safety goal), and teaching (making sure t… Continue

So... I've been thinking about how to use our existing data repositories for measuring cancer outcomes and for comparative effectiveness. QOPI is a great start (here) -- it is oncologist-driven and adaptable; the measurement process is scalable and can be accomplished in private practices and in large cancer centers. Because data extraction is labor intensive -- taking about an hour per chart (… Continue