I don’t believe that audiovisual will likely ever become a “standard” for patient documentation, but that doesn’t mean that some new technologies aren’t showing promise. Indeed, in this article from U.S. News, John Halamka, M.D., CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, discusses how he and his colleagues are working on potential Google Glass uses in the patient room in the hospital—for both physicians and nurses. What Dr. Halamka is talking about is more about navigating care delivery as a clinician than strictly about clinical documentation, though, if I understand his comments in that article correctly.
In that article, Dr. Halamka also refers to an interesting article in JAMIA, with commentary by researchers on “healthcare information technology's relativity problems: a typology of how patients’ physical reality, clinicians’ mental models, and healthcare information technology differ,” per its title.
In addition, Dr. Halamka spoke at the Health IT Summit in Boston Last month, sponsored by our sister organization, the Institute for Health Technology Transformation (iHT2), and spoke at some length about the great potential in Google Glass, as customized by individual patient care organizations, for navigating care delivery tasks in new ways going forward.
I think that over time, pioneers in healthcare clinical IT will find ways to incorporate audiovisual elements into clinical documentation; but for the moment, there are very large obstacles regarding technical standards, interoperability, shareability, and usability, that will have to be overcome. So, look to the future for some new uses of audiovisual technologies, and stay tuned—we at HCI will be covering those advances!
http://jamia.bmj.com/content/early/2013/06/25/amiajnl-2012-001419.abstract
