Health care column: High-tech medicine
| Monday, Mar 02 2009 03:11 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Mar 25 2009 06:17 PM
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Dr. Rex Truong stands by a keyboard and monitor he uses when he sees patients at the Kaiser Permanente office on Ming Avenue.
For the sake of Kaiser Permanente’s legal department, we won’t repeat the name that Dr. Rex Truong gave us for the short, tidy computer stand he wheels around patient exam rooms inside the company’s Ming Avenue offices. Instead, let’s call it, oh ... R2D3.
R2D3 helps Truong communicate with his patients. Through it, he gives them their lab results. He reminds them of medical appointments. He offers guidance on what to eat and when to exercise. R2D3 can do all this because it is part of Kaiser’s HealthConnect network, an integrated electronic medical records system that the company soon expects to expand companywide. It has been operating in Kern for about two years.
Not everybody likes little R2D3. Dr. David Hair, an ophthalmologist who last year opened the Bakersfield Eye Institute on Meany Avenue, said systems like HealthConnect feel impersonal.
“They slow the whole process down” for doctors, he said. “They feel like computers, not like people.”
The electronic medical records system Hair chose for his practice, by SRSsoft, is more of a hybrid that combines electronic efficiency with hand-written notes that can be scanned in and attached digitally to patient files.
Having worked on perhaps two dozen different electronic medical records systems in his career, Hair had two tips for physicians selecting from among the many medical software packages on the market: Don’t alter the way you work to accommodate the system, and consult your colleagues before making a purchase.
“Salesmen are good,” he said. “They make everything look great.”
For his part, Truong is fairly enamored of R2D3, which he more or less considers a hero because of the automatic cancer screening reminders it provides.
“It saves so (many) lives,” he said. “That’s the key.”
BETTER THAN A LOLLIPOP
Patients of Bakersfield dentist Dr. Peter S. Bae now have an added incentive to come in for a visit: They get to find out whether they have oral cancer.
Bae charges his patients $57 a year for unlimited access to cancer screenings that take between two and four minutes.
“It’s just like a dental checkup,” he said. “We have an audience every six months. Why are we not checking for oral cancer properly? And the key word is properly.”
For him, properly means using the VELscope system, which he purchased late last year for about $9,000. It works by shining a fluorescent light in the oral cavity. Abnormal tissue shows up as a dark area against an otherwise normal field of green light.
The National Institutes of Health reported in 2006 that the VELscope showed initial success in helping dentists visualize whether a patient might have a developing oral cancer.
According to LED Dental Inc., the Canadian company that makes the device, rates of deaths from oral cancer are greater than that of cervical, testicular, laryngeal or thyroid cancer. It says one American dies of the disease “every hour of every day.”
If customers come to Bae instead of their own dentist because he has the device, that’s fine, he said. But “that’s secondary” to patient health, he said.
“Better yet, I want their dentists to get this machine.”
