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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."
If this can save so much money why isn't the health care industry already doing it? Are they really that stupid or are all the promises of big savings not likely to pan out?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Getting all of the records into a standardized format is a stepping stone to universal health care. By biting it off in pieces, he's going to be able to make the apparent cost of the transition lower because much of the expensive work will have already been done by initiatives like this.
Having health records as a standard brings more transparency to the Health care industry, start with that and then soon people will want them standardized invoicing and billing etc. Obfustication seems to be a popular method to profit.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
$100billion? There are millions of patient records, but they do not reside in millions of databases. Let's be generous and say there are thousands of databases. But most of those databases are already manned by DBAs. Some of them may not be up to the task, but most can convert their tables to the specified format if you tell them what that is.
So it seems the task is coming up with a standard format and enforcing it. Security is another question, but again it seems a matter of mandating healthcare providers adhere to a specified standard. But hospitals and insurance companies are quite used to such bureaucracy, so it's difficult to understand where they're pulling this $100billion figure from.
Saying they'd need to hire an entire new class of DBAs and techs to make it happen is silly, since they already exist.
Odds are the figure was thrown against the wall by companies hoping to win a fat contract, and counting on the knowledge that politicians have no sense of what it takes to get the job done. I hope Obama's CIO has the knowledge and grit to tell them to take a hike.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
In case most of you had forgotten, Obama is basically copying John McCain who specifically mentioned doing this in the debates. Of course at the time McCain did it Slashdot thought it was an evil intrusion of privacy. But now that Obama wants to do the exact same thing it's an enlightened 21st century idea that only some Luddite old guy like McCain could ever oppose.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Almost a quarter of every dollar we spend on health care is used by administrative expenses. In Taiwan where they have digitalized medical records their overhead is only 2%. There is plenty of examples around the world to why electronic records are better economically. Also there is the benefit of less mistakes since cross referencing medications and such can be done electronically for drug interactions etc. Frontline had an excellent episode were they looked at the health care systems of several other modern democratic countries. A must watch for anybody who cares about the health care debate. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
We have a similar "project" or rather it should be characterised as a "permanently stalled horror story." There are only 70 million or so people in the UK so nobody understood why the initial budget was in the billions. Now it's in the tens of billions and no end in sight. Google NHS IT if you really want to spoil your day.
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On more than one occasion, we've had client companies, or prospective clients, come to us with requests for features and functionality that would be unethical, if not illegal. You are very correct - the idealistic principle of insurance is that it is a shared risk endeavor. That has been broken down by the insurance co's to a one-sided agenda where they know they have you by the balls and can deny for any reason under the sun, including those that specifically go against the grain of insurance (i.e. if you move to a different provider who provides 'substantially materially similar' benefits, at a separate rate, there should be no waiting period - statistics and probability don't work like that).
My wife uses chiro services. Non-insurance rate? $45. With insurance? $135. There is something very wrong with that picture, when you know that you are paying $500+ a month in health insurance, it's predominantly YOU paying that. Why not go to a HSA or FSA? Save that money, pay the cheaper rate - the only reason most people don't is for catastrophic coverage - so you'd think that catastrophic coverage only plans would be reasonably cheap, etc? No. Cheap, yes. After you pay some of the highest deductibles around (I've seen $7,500 personal, $20,000 family commonly).
It's a racket, and though anecdotal, there's something awry when someone whose income is derived from the insurance industry is agitating for universal health care (not that it'd go away entirely, but nonetheless), because as it stands now it is such a fundamentally broken system.