Arguing For Open Electronic Health Records

mynameismonkey writes "openEHR guru Tim Cook, writing in a guest blog at A Scanner Brightly, discusses why Electronic Health Record developers should use open standards. Why are so few doctors using EHR systems? And, as more and more hospital EHR systems come online across the country, what do we have to fear from proprietary databases? It's one thing to find out your social security number was stolen. Now add your mental health and STD results to those records."

Comments

Re:I seriously doubt it

[mrbluze]

Companies selling the systems make a killing from the converting of the old, proprietary database to the new, proprietary database that does not look that much different than the old one.

I think much of the problem has to do with legal problems on the storage of data and its dissemination (privacy laws, legal exposure etc) and that doctors have a general distrust of electronic record keeping without a paper backup. Also, arriving at an open standard on storage of health information is very very difficult as it's not a science and there are as many opinions as asses on seats at committee meetings. Everybody quotes easy stuff like pharmacy orders or pathology requests and results, but a health record can come in so many forms, (and if you look at a hospital record, there are so many types of forms in it) that it becomes difficult to come up with a database design that will cope with such diversity and still be usable. Information on a case can be a few scribbles to an exhaustive analysis.

That's not to say it won't happen, but it is taking a very long time and some expensive attempts at standardization (eg: NHS) have failed.