[lbhnact]

Just-graduated MD/MPH and former EMT and ED admin here. I empathize strongly, since the first time I watched a 16-year girl who'd been in a MVC and first transported to Duke, who needed sub-specialty consults at UNC get re-scanned.

I'd read about CT dosing and realized that we had just increased this girls lifetime likelihood of ovarian or endometrial cancer by perhaps about 1/1000. For absolutely no reason other than the fact we couldn't get the images 8 miles down the road from the Duke ED, and the attending wanted to 'just be sure'.

I asked the resident why they couldn't send them digitally and they just laughed. That was 2009.

It's 8 years and a few hundred billion of national EMR spend later - and you know what? We still can't send an image between the two EDs. UNC and Duke were the first two nodes/servers on Usenet back in 1980[1], and 37 years later we can barely exchange medical data using our combined 1.3 billion dollars of Epic EMR implementations.

This problem harms people needlessly every day. Please use your voice as a provider to remind people whenever possible.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet