Ricardo Low MD
II - CONCEPT PROCESSING: WHAT IS IT?
Medicine is an art; no two doctors practice it the
same way. A physician’s personal touch brings subtlety to the practice of
medicine, and over the years every practitioner develops his or her own
individual approach to this fascinating art.
In addition, each practitioner experiences a
bell-shaped frequency distribution of cases.
Some cases are amazingly rare, while a few might never
be seen in a lifetime of clinical practice. Still others, however, may arise
several times a day. Indeed, it is this very repetition and familiarity of
clinical cases that makes medicine learnable in the first place.
Figure . Bell-Shaped Curve.
A Concept Processor is a software engine that greatly
enhances the documentation of a new patient encounter by instantly
retrieving text from the most similar previous encounter for review,
editing and reuse.
This process will result in one of three outcomes:
1. The new patient encounter may be identical to
one previously “learned” by the program. Medical schools may argue that there
are no two identical patients, and therefore no two identical cases. However,
in the reality of daily practice, doctors often find themselves writing the
same cases in the same way. This is true because repetition exists within the
mind of the provider. In other words, each doctor tends to develop a CONCEPT
PROCESSING (TECHNICAL PAPER – NOVEMBER 2007) a particular set of words he or
she uses to express the same concepts.
2. The new patient encounter may be different, but similar
to one previously learned from another patient.
3. The new patient encounter is unique and different
from any seen before.
No other possibilities exist; an encounter must fall
within the bell-shaped curve of case types for any given provider.
Identical Encounters
If the encounter today is identical to one
treated in the past, the text will be generated instantly. Not only is the
charting generated immediately in the provider’s own words, but it is
also accompanied by all the additional documentation required at the same time:
printed or faxed prescriptions; instructions and patient handouts; procedures
and operative reports; letters to referring providers; admitting orders to the
hospital; laboratory orders; return visits and scheduling; even the routing
slip for billing purposes. All of these documents can be faxed or printed along
with the progress note…instantly !
The text produced has be to the doctor’s liking because
it was the same doctor who wrote it, albeit for a previous patient with exactly
the same condition as the current one.
Generating an entire note with all its corresponding
documents in this manner is certainly faster than dictation or speech recognition,
to say nothing about writing long hand.
