Abstract
The computer and telecommunications revolution has barely begun, although it has already profoundly changed our daily lives. But health care is still regrettably unplugged compared with other industries. Why? There are several obvious answers. For one thing, modern medicine is both complex and fragmented. And the medical profession has a long tradition and a strong ethos, not easily influenced by IT nerds. Also, security and patient integrity as well as other legal aspects put limits on what is feasible and desirable. The collapse of the dot.com business and the numerous accounting scandals have certainly not increased the profession’s confidence of internet.
Yet, documentation in today’s health care is obsolete: at the same time redundant and insufficient. Access time for paper documents are often measured in days or weeks rather than in milliseconds. This slow communication technology is bad for our patientsòat a time when the sheer magnitude of information necessary for medical decision-making is increasing exponentially. Another aspect is research and quality control. No manager of a manufacturing industry would keep his/her job without keeping the board happy with hard data on the quality of what is produced. How about medicine?
This symposium aims at giving a smorgasbord of IT applications in orthopaedic care, quality control and research. We will also discuss perhaps the most important question: what do we want the new technology to do for our patients and for orthopaedic surgery? Complications of limb salvage
Theses abstracts were prepared by Professor Dr. Frantz Langlais. Correspondence should be addressed to him at EFORT Central Office, Freihofstrasse 22, CH-8700 Küsnacht, Switzerland.
