Fortune
Electronic health records were supposed to do a lot: make medicine safer, bring higher-quality care, empower patients, and yes, even save money. Boosters heralded an age when researchers could harness the big data within to reveal the most effective treatments for disease and sharply reduce medical errors. Patients, in turn, would have truly portable health records, being able to share their medical histories in a flash with doctors and hospitals anywhere in the country—essential when life-and-death decisions are being made in the ER.
But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records—with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort—America has little to show for its investment. More
This was one of the most idiotic things to come out of the government. It actually does away with the private doctor. The reason is that an independent doctor can not afford the level of online security demanded, much less the fines and liability associated with illegal access to his office computer.
Then there is the fact that all hospitals and computers are not on the same program, so you can not get the information you desire.
Then the amount of pages goes from ten pages of information in an office chart before computers to over two hundred in a computer and none of them are relevant to the clinical situation.
It is impossible to find lab, xrays, and similar reports in a medical computer.
Doctors don’t know how to type and are not inclined to type when trying to analyse a patient.
So you get histories and physicals that are useless.
Who benefits? Administrators, easier to generate a list of charges.
My mom just broke her shoulder and I took her to the ER. She has good gov’t insurance but at least 3 times somebody came out to ask about it even after they scanned her card. It was over an hour before a doctor bothered to talk to her, for a whole 5 minutes. Oh and the first question they asked was “do you live in a safe home?” Implying it must have been deliberate. That’s the society we live in. Everybody is a criminal.
And why does it take an hour between x-rays and seeing the doctor? Only it wasn’t a doctor it was a nurse. X-rays are “developed” almost immediately but we have to wait an hour? Next appt, same crap. Have to go in an hour early for x-rays.
And every intern was covered in tats and had long beards! This is a country hospital!
They have really screwed up health care in this country. Politicians should have to use the same damn system.
Like almost every government regulation this was designed to help large businesses and to harm small ones. Intentionally.
Anonymous – my rule for ER visits: Eat first, it’ll be 3 hours before they decide to admit you.
Usually, the ER team is good, test taken quickly, X-Rays and other scans done fairly fast.
Doctor deciding what to do with you? That takes the rest of the 3 hours.
Crime wouldn’t pay if the Guv’mint ran it…..
Let me re-phrase that…Crime wouldn’t pay if it was a Guv’mint program…..Politicians have proven that crime actually does pay as a personal endeavor..
Amen! to all previous postings. The doctors I have seen, hate the enforced system. And reported realities — when hospital networks crash, no one knows what to do, and all medical personnel get frantic. All patients at risk.
The post is not accurate: while the whole of America has not profited from anything obama – least of all digitizing America’s medical records so they can be hacked and abused by the government and sinister entities like google and facebook – the crony-communist sector of America has profited to the tune of $36 billion.