A Pediatrician at Home
8 pm: A Pediatrician at Home Checks on Her Patients
It's 8 pm. Elaine Billmire, MD, a community pediatrician with Group Health Associates, has finished dinner. After loading the dishwasher, she sits down at her computer — promising her teenage daughter that she'll be done in just a minute.
She wants to plan her schedule for the next morning. Dr. Billmire is rounding for her group this week. Before going to her office, she'll stop at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center to visit any of their hospitalized patients.
Are there new test results for the children she saw today? Has anyone been discharged? Have any other children from her group been admitted? How many children will she be seeing in the morning? What rooms are they in?
Thanks to online patient information from Cincinnati Children's, Dr. Billmire can quickly find this information.
She gets on the web and logs on to Medical Staff Central, the hub of information for community-based members of the Cincinnati Children's medical staff. With a click of her mouse, she links to ICIS and enters her password. The system automatically calls up the patient census for her group.
She sees that one patient has been discharged and two more admitted. She jots the room numbers for the children who've been admitted and checks the rounds report to get more information about these children. Who are the residents and subspecialists caring for them in the hospital? What tests or medications have the hospital doctors ordered? Are any test results available?
Before logging off Medical Staff Central, she checks "What's Bugging Us," a weekly report on infectious diseases in the community, based on cases confirmed by lab testing at Cincinnati Children's. This update will help her interpret symptoms in her own patients.
With this, she's done. She'll check again in the morning to see if there are any changes overnight. For now, she can turn over the computer to her daughter, who has homework to do.
