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Obama Proposes Digital Health Records
An anonymous reader writes "'President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.' The plan includes having all conventional records converted to digital within 5 years. Independent studies are fixing this cost somewhere in the range of $75 to $100 Billion, with most of the money going to paying and training technical staff to work on the conversion. Early government estimates are showing 212,000 jobs could be created by this plan."
No doubt Microsoft is already working on their own closed source Microsoft Health Information File Format, with its own special brand of DRM and licensing scheme.
Shhh!!! You're going to ruin it for everybody.
The Government should auction off the format specification to help pay for the costs.
Why that's allowed is beyond me but it is.
Probably in cases of fraud. We've all seen the CSI/L&O/NYPDB where some poor widow has $1M in health care charges and magically pays it off after some alleged wrong doing with some kingpin.
Add some extra space for buffering, swap space, and so forth, and you're talking about a Terrabyte of data per year for the X-Rays at a large community hospital. MRI, CT, Ultrasound, Angiography, and all the rest will add more, of course.
The hospital I used to work at stored about 2.5 terabytes of images per year.
Christ!!! That's almost $250 a year for storage!!!!! Or, $75,000,000,000 if you're the govment!
Sleep is for the Weak