Putting Google to Work

For the past six months, I have been shadowing nurse practitioners (NPs), RNs, and anesthesiology residents at the preoperative clinic of a Boston hospital. 

During one of the appointments I sat in on today, the patient and his son had come from outside the U.S.. The son acted as an interpreter, and gave me and the NP a list of his father's medicines. While some of the medicines' names corresponded to the generic names used in the U.S., several of them did not. The software used by my hospital to make patient medication lists only knows U.S. generic and brand names.

What began as a challenging, but less than productive guessing game ("What's Losec?"/"It's for his stomach") changed with Google. With the NP at the computer, I fed the medication names to Google, and translated the foreign generic names to something we could use. While Losec happened to sound very close to its American trade name, Prilosec, the rest of the American drug names bore absolutely no resemblance to the foreign drug names. There was one drug name which looked (to the NP) like the generic name for a prescription medication, but turned out to be acetaminophen (Tylenol).

Using this information, we were able to write the patient's medication list for the day of surgery so that it had the American and foreign drug names side by side.

In the my hospital's operating rooms, we have a number of tools for "smarter" health care delivery, from sponges with bar codes (so we don't lose them in a patient) to robotic instruments.

Before today, I wouldn't have thought that the phone I use to read Dear Prudence on the bus could be used to make a bilingual medication list.