Luz Aqui!

Sometimes I look for problems that need solving. The major bore of being a doctor is filling out all the paperwork. The estomatologists, gastroenterologist, and maybe some of the surgeons can fill this paperwork out on the computer but it involves too many drop-down lists to choose from and time is lost when the hands must switch from the keyboard to the mouse all the time to find different x-rays of patients. I feel like the hospital needs a touch screen for every hospital bed with an attached keyboard at hand height while standing so that the doctor just needs to type in information about the patient and the computer does the sorting of information into all the boxes, like my Google calendar does. In Google calendar, I can type in “Meet Marie at 9 at O Forno café” and a new event is created at 9 for O Forno and titled “Meet Marie”. I think it is genius and if we could just have something where they type in symptoms and the current diagnosis and current medications and other information, the computer could know which is which 100% of the time and then the doctors would have more time for other things. The touch screens could be very hygienic as well as long as the surface of each can be sterilized. Anyway, I’m sure other people have thought of something like this but it must have had security issues or the technology is too expensive or hard to get older doctors to learn.

Also there was one day in surgery that the light was a major source of stress between a very wise surgeon and a nurse. I understood some of the yelling “Luz!” and with the gestures I could tell that the light was on his arm and not on the intestines that was clearly being worked on. It was the nurses responsibility to move the light whenever needed so the area is visible. I suppose a solution would for each surgeon to have a head lamp, but isn’t very stable or reliable. The light could instead be on a grid and move around automatically to have a default on the center of the patient and then use a type of algorithm to find the best placement possible above the surgeon's heads to illuminate the area effectively. It could also be customized by speaking to it out loud to find a certain tool and focus on it. The light should also know when it is being blocked by a surgeon’s head and move accordingly. This light would be useful in the estomatologia office to reduce the transfer of infectious diseases because the doctor does not have to use his own hand right after being in a patient’s mouth to adjust the light. These are just some of my comments and I’ll try to post more about what I’m actually doing later!

Nicole Busby