Editor Dan Buckland is currently on the wards as part of his 3rd yr of medical school, and will be posting short gadget-related notes. All HIPAA compliant of course.
In my time on the neurology epilepsy inpatient service I’ve seen one patient (and heard of a few others) with focal seizures who had a clever response to the “Can you describe your seizures?” question. The patient took out his cell phone and showed us a video of it that he took during the last episode. This was great, as it made it much more likely that we could properly characterize the condition in the notes rather than basing it on the patient’s description. This isn’t a new gadget, or concept. Videos of seizures are an important part of an epilepsy work-up, but recently it is more likely for a significant portion of the patient population to be carrying a video recording device with them to capture an event anywhere they are.
Now if only there was some easy way to put that video into the EMR…
Image credit:: Wellcome Images: Neurobiology – artwork