One hospital’s paper trail

On a typical day, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s computer network handles 100,000 emails, routes and tracks 3,000 lab tests, discharges 80 patients, and orders thousands of prescriptions. When a network overload brought the system to a crawl 13 days ago, staffers were forced to do their previously computer-aided tasks by hand — requiring hundreds of hours of overtime and hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper.

Admitting


SOURCE: Dianne Anderson and Dr. John Halamka, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center