A costly scenario. It makes a big difference in yearly maintenance, when vendors charge you for every little interface you've got. And I just can't afford to have 10 different laptops. Neither can other institutions. Ellis Jacobs, PhD, director of stat laboratories and POC testing at Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York, supports the consortium's efforts and hopes it will solve some of the woes of the current system.
Institutions wind up with a room full of computers and no room for people.
We want to see a commonality of systems so we don't have the plethora of different computers, workstations, and report formats for what we do. We want systems to be as simple and easy to use as possible. In addition, such systems should help pathologists meet various regulatory guidelines, Dr. Jacobs says. We also have to make sure the system doesn't impede a timely result. Even if systems do exactly what we want, they may be very cumbersome.