Ah, but even obs charts are going electronic. I had to implement a system that uses PDA's across a wlan back to a server. there were 10 PDA's per ward across 30 wards. Thats on one site alone.
the reason were because
anything paper based was moving electronic anyway
no physical storage for notes & chart left
doctors/nurses handwriting couldn't be read, and as such couldn't be relied on.
electronic notes couldn't be changed post the event
Unformtunately everything will eventually go electronic. And the reasons being used are not only the above, but also environment, long term cost, relyability.
New hosptitals getting built dont have medical records departments in the same way. they wont have storage for notes, because they want to reduce the physical footprint, as well as the carbon fottprint blah blah blah.
So notes then get moved off site, and the service of providing them and storing them goes to a comercial company who charge large amounts of cash, and get the hospitals to sign up to that contract.
I got into the RFID/RTLS game after looking into a project to reduce these costs, and to track notes in a "super hospital" as they were getting lost. Over 40,000 notes were being delivered each week, and at anytime almost 10,000 were "lost" because the delivery point didn't know where they had gone. the service supplier wasn't at fault, it was down to mis management of the notes internally that created to extra costs. anyway this is the rfid tracking convo, not time one...sorry
