As future president Barak Obama starts to put some more details around his plans for an economic stimulus package, one component caught my eye (besides the potential $1 trillion price tag). One of the areas he intends to invest in ishealthcare technology especially IT such as electronic medical records, as reported by Healthcare IT News. The number tossed around that might be allotted to this area is $10 billion, which might be enough to start scratching the surface.
Electronic medical records (EMR) would be a big help for patient and doctors. First, it would cut costs of healthcare over time. Consider everyone on a physician’s staff…how many are directly involved in patient care? Very few. Most are involved in trying to move records around and chase down payments from insurance companies. EMR should cut way down on this. In addition, care should be improved as physicians can see a fully integrated history of every patient and more easily avoid errors like prescribing something that the patient is allergic to. Finally, like everything else in life, you want and deserve more control over your stuff–your records in this case. What’s in your records at your primary care physician’s office? You probably don’t know and if you wanted to find out they’d probably charge you PER PAGE for the information. Whose info is it anyway?
Fact is, many people have already given up on expecting their doctor or insurance company to keep their records for them so Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health have come forward to give you a free and easy way to do it. On top of this, some smart hospitals like Cleveland Clinic have already partnered with Google rather than recreate something from scratch.
This is all well in good, but here’s the problem: there’s no coordinated effort. You have insurance companies making their own system. Doctors running another. Google and Microsoft doing their thing. And, not to be outdone, a bunch of other third party systems like MyChart hatching each day. Do you think these will eventually all work together? Of course not. Your records will still be scattered all over the place, but they’ll be ones and zeros instead of pieces of paper. Is that progress?
How about someone calls a timeout and gets everyone aligned so someday my doctor and I can really open a single web page and see all of my records in one place? Until then, it’s all just another digital solution without a purpose that could, in the end, cost much more when we do try to integrate everything in the future. Remember all the hand coding to fix the Y2K computer bugs? Getting all these different platforms, which likely all use a different language, could require similar work. How much did we waste on Y2K to fix something that simple?
But, there is someone who could call a timeout. Barack Obama. Before shelling out $10 billion, how about setting out some rules for a common platform with common features and a way to share data across the different systems? I’m not suggesting he declare one platform the winner, but mandate that each must be open enough to allow for integration otherwise you don’t get a cut of the funds. Simple really.
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