The Complexities to Creating Real Electronic Health Records
Apr 27, 2010, 23:03 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by David Lane)
"If you have been paying attention (even if you do not live in
the United States), you know that the U.S. Congress passed a broad,
sweeping piece of legislation, purported to reform health care in
the United States. What you probably do not know (even if you do
live in the United States) is that this is not the first piece of
legislation to target the issue of health care. In fact, a number
of pieces of legislation, and a fair amount of money, has been
thrown at the issue of health care in the United States in the last
few years, specifically in the area of electronic health records.
But with all of this focus on streamlining and digitally
electrifying health records, I began to wonder where did the Open
Source community stand and where is its input? There is certainly a
lot of money sitting out there for someone who wants to try to
build the better mouse trap.
"What got me thinking about this was an article in the Spring
2010 issue of 2600 that reminded that the issue of record keeping,
one of the so called linchpins of reducing a lot of the costs of
health care, is not as simple an issue as you might expect. The
article cites the break-in and ransom of the Commonwealth of
Virginia's Prescription Monitoring program. This is not the first
time I have written about it. But for me, it highlighted one of the
many issues that need to be considered when we talk about an
eHealth record system. To me, this and a couple of other issues
need to be highlighted to better understand the full scope of the
problem.
"Electronic health records need to be about more than just cost
recovery. You could argue that electronic health records are
already widely used. And I would not argue with you. I have records
in more than my share of medical facilities. But the core purpose
of these records is not about patient care, but financial
recovery."
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