People get the same kinds of illnesses, the same treatments. “We thought, naively, diagnosis is the same in the U.S.
#EPIC SYSTEM IN HOSPITALS SOFTWARE#
In the Epic case, as Galster plunged deep into the software to reconfigure it for Danish clinicians, he realized how much it reflected a fundamental difference between the United States and Denmark, where trust and consensus are key components of the health care system. The VA has begun implementing Cerner - Epic’s leading competitor - replacing its homegrown VISTA platform that had been designed for treating veterans and their unique problems like missing limbs, PTSD and Agent Orange syndrome.ĭenmark’s evolving experience could show what is lost - or, eventually, gained - when a country, a region or a mammoth institution surrenders its way of doing things and conforms with a computer system designed for an alien culture. In that sense, this tiny Scandinavian country’s problems with its expensive IT transformation may have a lesson for the rest of the world, including the VA, which serves a population roughly twice the size of this nation of 5.6 million. It’s been said that when culture and science go to war, culture wins.
In Danish hospitals, nurses and doctors dispense the drugs, not pharmacies. hospital systems and doctors’ offices bought digital record systems primarily to bill more efficiently - the care component came later. Denmark has socialized medicine Danes don’t need insurance and don’t have medical bills. and Danish health care systems are starkly different. “When you open the hood in the Epic system, it plays ‘U.S.A, U.S.A, U.S.A,’” he said. medical culture that it couldn’t be disentangled. Epic might work in the United States, he thought, but its design was so hard-coded in U.S. The translation problem went deeper than mere words, said Galster, one of 350 hired for the $500 million implementation of Epic in eastern Denmark. The Danish system for a short time offered surgeons the choice of amputating the left leg or the “correct” leg. The American specialty “speech and language pathologist” does not exist in Denmark.
“C-section,” in the Danish version, referred to an executive suite, not an emergency birth procedure. Epic’s medical terms were not tagged for easy translation, so Galster and his colleagues had to rely on Google Translate. The problems were evident from the start.
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