The health service is about 30 years behind other sectors in exploiting technology to the detriment of patient safety, budgets and working conditions. Kathy Burke reports
While supermarkets and their suppliers can today locate a single tin of beans in real-time, and ATMs across the EU will dispense money from your Irish bank account, no hospital or GP can access a patient's medical history to find out what vaccinations, allergies, illnesses or treatments they had in the past.
Some hospitals are more progressive than others in rectifying this technology deficit by having some of that information electronically stored.
But in the vast majority of cases, they would have to ask the patient if, for example, they remember ever being found to be allergic to a certain antibiotic.
Doctors are still handwriting prescriptions, medical samples are sent for analysis by post, urgent samples are prioritised only by being sent by courier, and over-worked, qualified healthcare professionals still handle massive amounts of paperwork and manually dispense life-critical drugs in stressful conditions.
"If it was happening in the banking sector, there would be uproar," says Guy Johnston of the telecommunications consultancy, ETM.
"It is falling on deaf ears here," he claims, "yet our health is our wealth."
EAN Ireland highlighted the issue at a conference in Dublin last month. EAN International is a not-for-profit organisation with more than 100 offices worldwide.
The organisation was established 28 years ago to develop global standards for barcoding, scanning and other supply chain technologies, initially for the grocery retail sector.
The Department of Health's document, Health Information: A National Strategy, launched in October, recognises the need for investment in a cohesive technology infrastructure.
It is committed to introducing the "electronic healthcare record", on a "phased basis".
EAN Ireland's director, Jim Bracken, welcomes this, adding: "It is marked for funding now, what remains is gaining priority."
Unique identification is the crux of an electronic healthcare system, involving unique identification of drugs and devices used in treatment and the unique identification of the patient.
The national strategy document envisages that the personal identification will be based on the PPS number. "John Brown's electronic health record number would link to his records. It would point to his GP, for instance, and to every past medical event, which would have separate global service record numbers [GSRN]," Bracken explains.
Making the data available in 'real-time' has the potential to make dramatic improvements to the interaction between GPs, hospital laboratories and in-patient care.
At present, GPs take blood or urine samples and send them to hospital laboratories.
In most instances, labs are considered to be similar to "mailrooms in the morning". A lab doesn't know that a sample is on its way and won't know if it gets lost. Samples sometimes get mixed up.
Under an electronic system, the doctor would barcode-label the sample with the patient's identification number, the tracking number for that medical event, the GP's identification number, and numbers that identify the tests required.
The GP would notify the lab via the Healthlink Portal (already in existence since 2003) that this sample is on its way, and would indicate the urgency so the lab could prioritise the samples.
Paperwork becomes virtually non-existent and maybe those hospital beds that are often 'blocked' by patients waiting for test results would be freed earlier.
"The technology exists already," Johnston insists. "The impediment is culture change."
Bracken adds that the business case is clear: there is a two-year pay-back of the investment because hospitals cut out the costs of inefficiencies. They also avoid the cost of litigation that can come with errors.
"It is a terrible indictment of society that in 2004, our healthcare professions are trying to run a health service based on methods developed two centuries ago," he adds.