Comments on: Health care experts warn of challenges for IT adoption

Health care providers and other experts challenge President Obama's assertion that implementing the use of electronic medical records will be easily implemented.

[gregs.mailbox]

Electronic medical records. Our medical facility uses them and have been for 3 years. The only thing I have seen is how billing reaps more money. New patient charges have always been present to offset having to enter the patients information and insurance along with a history and physical. Now with electronic records when you see a new doctor in the same facility it is a new patient charge for $200.00 using information already collected and used during the visit. Big rip off of insurance money and patients without insurance.

[RobertFHarwood]

More then a decade ago American National Standards Instuitute (ANSI) came out with standards for healthcare and insurance information as part of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Hence there is no reason for a propietary system, just format the information to the standard. Use Electronic Digtal Signatures (PKI X.509) to encrypt the data in transit and authenticate it. Health and Human Services could use a array of Petabox drives to store the data as XML within the ANSI standard. Make it compulsory for providers paid with Federal money (Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, Veterans, Indian Affairs, etc) to file all of the data in the system in order to be paid. Yet keep it open to all licensed providers, payers, for free. This way the payers (insurance companies, union benefit plans, self insured employers, etc.) have no reason to create their own system, with its costs. They can create an interface to their internal system.

Sure software companies like my own will complain about the lost oportunity. We can still create the front ends and interfaces to other systems (such as accounting).

Only a big stick will get this done. Carrots have not worked. They don't comply, they don't get paid. Come to think of it pull their license to practice and padlock the office after you take all the records to be transcribed to the system and bill them for the work.

The standards are already implace. There is already goverment bureacracy inplace to handle it.

[Bristol Slim]

For one thing, I don't know why even the dumbest man on the street can believe anything from the AEI or its benefactors. Remember going into Iraq and the parades and candies? Yeah. That was them, too.

For another, you can count on a continuing drumbeat of gloom about the "complexities" of e-record sharing and privacy issues, since the overwhelming majority of Americans are now ready to embrace some kind of radical change in the way healthcare is handled in the U.S.

It was about 5 years ago that my scripters made data move from 5 big iron systems from the '70s & '80s into a SQL DB, and made it accessible via a browser to the client and to inside reps. Now my outside reps access it in the field. Billing, pricing, contact info. Very sensitive stuff.

The statement about "complexities with the sharing of data" is nonsense. I believe what he's saying is, "this is going to be hard, it's going to cost me something on my bottom line, and I don't want to do it."

These fatcats in the hospital system see that the writing is on the wall: no more 7-figure executives who couldn't find their perl scripters with both hands in broad daylight.

What scares me most is Microsoft's interest and coziness with D.C. on this issue. Can you imagine the spiked increase in data leaks of your personal health info if Microsoft were to take a lead role? How about the intentional incompatibilities and other monopolistic practices that will stifle innovation in this area. And, yes, of course the Blue Screen of Death and other instabilities/inconsistencies prevalent with Microsoft technologies will no doubt impede critical care.

[JEngdahlJ]

It?s funny how contentious issues play out: There?s the real evidence about the effectiveness of electronic health records, and then there?s the hype. We tend to hear more about the promise, less about what has been proven.

With EHR, what?s been proven is that having doctors in hospitals use the computer to enter orders that are legible, with the correct decimal point, and that can?t be mistaken, reduces medication errors dramatically. Further, the turnaround time from when an order is written until when the medication is delivered to the patient can be markedly reduced.

Just putting computers into a broken healthcare system makes it faster and more expensive ? and still broken. We have other things to fix as we implement these systems if we're to accomplish effective reform. EHR is perhaps part of the solution but not the silver bullet. More at http://www.healthcaretownhall.com/?p=93

[s.ge]

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