Family Medicine Notes

Looks like we missed this one: 

"What if everybody in the world farted at the same time?"

We were all supposed to fart at 4 PM Pacific time today.  Oops.  I forgot.

I was given a gift a few months ago by a family with several young children:  The Gas We Pass.  It's a very funny book.   Perfect for the waiting room.

Lactose intolerance is probably the most common cause of frequent farting:

Between 30 and 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant. Certain ethnic and racial populations are more widely affected than others. As many as 75 percent of all African Americans and American Indians and 90 percent of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant. The condition is least common among persons of northern European descent.

Here's a nice patient handout on Lactose Intolerance.  Patients have usually heard of lactaid, but I usually make sure that they know that they don't need to spend $8.00 for lactase.  Wal-Mart, CVS and several of our local supermarkets carry generic versions of lactase for much less.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 09:15 PM | Permalink

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 05:27 AM | Permalink

More questions in today's e-mail about the AAFP Open Health Record project.

It's based on the Oceania EMR.  The company no longer exists .. and I don't know much about what happened .. who currently owns the intellectual property, or what the current status of the software is.  It was a progressive system in its day - developed by folks who were trend setters in XML and applications of SGML to healthcare.

Courtesy of the Internet Archive, You can view a demo of the circa 1999 version (well .. just a few screenshots .. but you can get an idea of what it's all about).

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Meanwhile .. back in our 50+ physician practice .. we struggle with decisions about what to do about an EMR.  We've been using the Mysis EMR on a trial basis for 18 months.  Lot sof problems recently with it recently.  I'm becoming convinced -- after using it for all of this time -- that this product just won't do.  There are too many basic problems with the system to make it clinically useful.  Usability is sacrificed, and complexity dominates.  I'm trying my best to give it a 'college try' but is still frustraing on a daily basis.

I visited another group of family physicians this afternoon.  They're implementing the Greenway practice management system and EMR.  High hopes to reduce their $150,000/year of transcription costs.  I was suprised by how little they knew about the details of the Greenway product.  They didn't do much homework.  I'll do a demo of Greenway later in the week.  Will post my impressions here.

Posted by Jacob Reider, MD at 05:26 AM | Permalink