Only 9% of U.S. hospitals have electronic health records, according to a new survey that reveals the gap between the present state of American health care and a high-tech future envisioned by policy makers.
“We are at a very early stage in adoption, a very low stage compared to other countries,” said David Blumenthal, a Harvard professor and an author of the survey. Last week, the Obama administration named Dr. Blumenthal National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
The survey, sent to hospitals in March 2008 and published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, found that most institutions have some basic electronic systems, such as those for reporting patients’ lab results.
Words cannot describe the complete and terrible mess that the government regulations have made of e-records. To name just one example, they continually change the identification numbers by which a patient is identified. It is [i]a living nightmare[/i] of expensive regulation.
Not to mention the changing and difficult to understand standards.
Additionally, the high resolution pictures required for diagnosis of things like CAT, PET, MRI scans and xrays require huge amounts of space. Hospitals are into the petabyte (1024 terabytes) and moving into the exabyte (1024 petabytes) range of storage required for their electronic records.
That much storage requires a lot of IT to manage and maintain and backup and safeguard and we IT types don’t come cheap!
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Never mind. You could be living in the UK where the government has poured billions into a health care IT network that still does not function properly. There have been some advances. My physician for example gets test results straight to his desktop from the hospital clinic. But still, apparently, different hospitals throughout the country cannot talk to one another. Somehow whatever our government touches by way of computers is doomed. And indeed dizzyingly expensively doomed.
Could hospitals start talking electronically with each other, putting government aside? Eventually hospitals will have to upgrade or be possibly faced with increased lawsuits based on poorly kept records or no records at all. Just asking!!!
The hospitals I frequent here have E-records and it’s absolutely MAGIC! Within a day or two of having tests done, my physicians and home health agency have the results and communicate with me immediately. Because of this, my care has improved tremendously.
teatime, what you describe most hospitals already have and it is really nice, but that is not what the government is mandating. They want everything on line and sent to a central deposit where they and every insurance company and who knows who will have access to it. There is no standardization for it and the cost is another hugh unfunded mandate—and it drastically cuts efficiency and productivity. It converts doctors from healers to clerk typist. The VA has EMR and it cut doctor patient care by forty percent. The average medical office pays about $50,000 to set it up and after two years one half get rid of the system. Most venders say to have six months of money available for delayed revenue and expect six to nine months to learn the system and about 20% of key office people will resign in disgust. This is not about good records, but about central control, kinda like those great Soviet central control and five year plans that turned out so good. Some day a system may evolve, but not if the government mandates and micromangages it. Just another hassel and discouragement that only encourages more retirements.
Electronic medical records would not be nearly as burdonsome were it not for the foolishness required by the government and insurance companies. This foolishness requires the addition of massive amounts of unnessesary boilerplate text and data, which is only looked at in the event of a lawsuit or political problem.
Of course EMR makes sense in a system burdened under massive amounts of data storage requirements. That data would be alot less were it not for gov’t and insurance mandates. The problem with using EMR is that the computer generates more and more useless data, which corresponds less and less to the actual patient’s condition. So, the chart looks great, but the patient got poor care because everyone was treating the chart. This happens all the time.
Additionally, alot of what goes into the EMR is patently false, but there is no time to go back to fix it. Lawyers are starting to figure this out now and challenging the validity of electronic records. So, the day will come very soon when we will have to videotape every encounter to prove that we actually saw the patient, etc. Imagine the data storage requirements of continuous video?
Bureocrats and bean counter types love paperwork and data more than they care about patients. We have not figured out how to please them with data entry while still taking care of our patients.
But with the hopeful change and changing hope and change we can believe in, since we are the change that we have been waiting for, no doubt all these problems will be solved with more government power and intervention!!