I get that it isn't a big time taker, so this is just abstract commentary.
This is an obvious opportunity for improvement: I call the hospital because I want to make sure they got the transmission. The ideal case would be that you don't even have to think about whether they have the information or not, the system should handle that with very high reliability.
You've also taken "decision" differently than I meant it. I meant, why do you have to decide to transmit the EKG, not the decision about which hospital to go to. Repeating myself, it would seem to be an improvement if you didn't have to pay any attention to whether the appropriate hospital had access to any readings/recordings that you had (I would think it would be better if it were trivial for someone there to pull them up, of course with high reliability).
I'm not feeling around for some opportunity to innovate/improve, I'm just curious about the factors that such a system has to deal with, and which of those factors are less idea than they could be, and why. That it isn't a big opportunity for improvement is useful feedback in general, but it doesn't really address the curiosity.
When I say I'm confirming they got it, I mean I'm confirming someone actually looked at it. The fact that it was delivered successfully is indeed reported to me.
The act of transmitting the EKG serves to give the hospital a heads up that I'm coming, and that I think this patient needs care right away. I understand you're suggesting a system where every bit of data my monitor collects is available in every hospital in real-time, so I just have to call them up and reference it. My point is that is that the act of sending the EKG is a really miniscule part of the process. You're talking about 5 seconds over the course of a 30 minute event.
I don't think the tradeoffs in complexity and quiet failure modes would be worth it. If I transmit something, I get a confirmation right then that it did or didn't work. If a passive data aggregation system fails (and I'm used to it 'just working'), then I may not notice that it failed.
This is an obvious opportunity for improvement: I call the hospital because I want to make sure they got the transmission. The ideal case would be that you don't even have to think about whether they have the information or not, the system should handle that with very high reliability.
You've also taken "decision" differently than I meant it. I meant, why do you have to decide to transmit the EKG, not the decision about which hospital to go to. Repeating myself, it would seem to be an improvement if you didn't have to pay any attention to whether the appropriate hospital had access to any readings/recordings that you had (I would think it would be better if it were trivial for someone there to pull them up, of course with high reliability).
I'm not feeling around for some opportunity to innovate/improve, I'm just curious about the factors that such a system has to deal with, and which of those factors are less idea than they could be, and why. That it isn't a big opportunity for improvement is useful feedback in general, but it doesn't really address the curiosity.