I was speaking to a doctor friend of mine who was complaining that their server at work was getting full and was curious what IT was planing on doing about it. He was afraid to mention this to the IT department as he was expecting the answer to be something similar to “delete all of your non-patient related files”.
I was a bit curious, what patient related files that they were talking about. I am used to big banks with large databases that are jammed packed full of customer data. I was more surprised at how the data was being stored.
Each day a graph was generated from another system and saved into an excel spreadsheet for that patient for that day. Of course there were other pieces of patient data that could actually be entered into the sheet as well. What was more surprising was the standard procedure was to take the patient’s sheet from the previous day and copy it with a new name for today and then insert the new graph.