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Why Digital Medical Records Are No Panacea
theodp writes "As GE, Google, Intel, IBM, Microsoft and others pile into the business of computerized medical files in a stimulus-fueled frenzy, BusinessWeek reminds us that electronic health records have a dubious history. Under the federal stimulus program, hospitals can get several million dollars apiece for tech purchases over the next five years, and individual doctors can receive up to $44,000. There's also a stick: The feds will cut Medicare reimbursement for hospitals and practices that don't go electronic by 2015. But does the high cost and questionable quality of products currently on the market explain why barely 1 in 50 hospitals have a comprehensive electronic records system, and why only 17% of physicians use any type of electronic records? Joe Bugajski's chilling The Data Model That Nearly Killed Me suggests that may be the case."
Everyone knows that everything should be computerized, since everyone knows that big, REALLY COMPLICATED data systems always work and always come in under budget.
Like the redesigned FBI data system that works so perfectly!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Interesting, for certain - and raises some good points for discussion in the how the system is implemented.
But it's anecdotal evidence, as much as it may affect the author, doesn't necessarily prove the point.
Wouldn't it be better to spend that money on diagnostic equipment, and outfitting small town clinics. I would rather have a piece of paper that says "repaired cerebral aneurysm" than to have an electronic file that says "died waiting for MRI".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'm failing to see the problem here. This sounds no different than photocopying a set of printouts. The HIPPA laws only cover leaking records to people who aren't authorized to see them. Since it's your wife's records, you don't fall in that category and should be allowed to see them.
This article reads like a lifetime made for TV movie. Heavy on emotion devoid of logic.
The author was repeated asked for his medical information, his doctor's written instructions were ignored and different departments within the hospital did not communicate. Therefore the problem is Obama's computerized data record system that doesn't exist yet.
The whole time I was reading it I was waiting for the author to tie his experience to how computerized medical records are bad. He never did, his experiences were caused by humans that did not care enough about patients to read computerized records OR paper records.
The author fails to explain how his experience proves anything other than that particular hospital is terrible and that the health professionals employed there are less than friendly.
More doctors. Break the back of the AMA, double the seats in medical school and let the market do more of the talking.
The tired old argument of "fewer, but better doctors" is bullshit. You know what they call the guy who barely got through medical school the day he graduates? "Doctor!"
All of the regulations miss the point entirely. There are not enough doctors, not enough competition. Even the "evidence-based medicine" advocates miss the point about mandating "best practices" when you have people like the orthopedic surgeon who treated my mother. The man was 15-20 years out of date on certain techniques, and did them according to the way he was trained, and screwed the pooch big time. A doctor at UVA medical school had to intervene to get her back to normal.
People like that couldn't exist in other professions that are less regulated and coddled. Imagine someone only knowing C/C++/Ada circa 1995 today and trying to compete in the mainstream software development market for new development work. It's laughable here, but doctors get away with that.
... and here we have just a single anecdote about how the system did not work in one instance. If we are playing the anecdote game, I'm sure I can find a similar example where non-computerized health records lead to bad care. Of course, while the anecdote game is very effective at playing at human emotional response (we tend to assign more weight to a story that we can associate with a single person versus aggregate statistics), it's useless as an actual policy question.
Since every complicated system has failures, even the critical ones like hospitals and air traffic control, the important policy question is not whether it works in all instances, it's whether it produces overall better care than the system it's replacing and whether that improvement is worth the difference in price. If the new system actually reduces costs, then it's a good idea so long as it doesn't degrade care (since, ultimately, reduced cost means either more health care or more dollars to satisfy other wants).
I'm not going to comment on the data myself, since you should read the studies for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=7C274D08947B0625B3B540BEF2E70367.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=416400
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/348/22/2218
(PDF)
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1421388
PS. Of course there's no panacea for our medical problem. The question is whether EHR are better than the system we've got, not whether they represent the best possible system. The perfect is not the enemy of the good.
PPS. I have a sneaking suspicion, reading my post (yeah, some /.ers actually read their own posts before hitting submit :-P) that I will be accused of not having the proper sympathy for the guy in TFA. That's not true. I have sympathy for him as an individual, but I'm not going to let that sympathy for him cloud my judgment on the merits of a system.
For example, suppose there was a highway by you that had no center divider, just a grassy median. Suppose also, for the sake of argument, that installing a jersey barrier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_barrier will lower the injury/fatality rate in accidents by a statistically significant amount by preventing out-of-control cars from going into oncoming traffic. Now, hypothetically, someone could be in an accident where the jersey barrier caused him serious injury or death (say, by flipping his car even though they are designed to minimize that chance) where the old system would have been just fine (say, because there was no oncoming traffic at the time of the accident). Does someone that still says we have jersey barriers not have sympathy for that guy? No. His death is regrettable but because we can't make a perfect road, we have to settle for the best road we can make.
The problem is that you can point to someone that's injured (and provoke an emotional response related to his regrettable accident) but the only thing the jersey barrier proponent can do is point to the statistics that say there are fewer serious injuries since they've been installed. There's no emotional resonance to the thousands of people that travel without incident each day because they don't make a good story. "Man drives to work safely" isn't news, but because it happens much more often that "Man killed in car wreck", it's actually much more important in the grand scheme of things.
We aren't privy to all the stories where EHR made things smoother, cheaper or helped prevent calamity. Largely, these will be small victories, unsung
Explain how a trusted system is some sort of IT obstacle.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I RTFA, and there is a very telling reader comment at the end...
The moral of the story, then, is that no amount of even well-organized information can compensate for a break in the continuity of care. The allergist tossed this guy to the wolves with a post-it note stuck to his forehead. The current system couldn't cope with that, and it's hard to imagine any system that could, because the hospital et. al. can't morally or legally just follow the instructions on the post-it note; they have to start from scratch.
The allergist had to know this, but dropped the ball anyway. Find a new allergist.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The administration either has an undisclosed agenda or no idea what is really wrong with the health care industry. I work for a large medical institution in their IS department and I spend most of my time moving medical data around. In the short time I've been here, I have run across several roadblocks to providing efficient, safe and effective medical treatment.
The most detrimental entity in all of health care has to be the private health insurance industry. Insurance companies have spent a great deal of time and money developing strategies to MAKE MONEY. They are not in the business of making people well, they are constructed to make profits and protect those profits at all costs. They have nearly perfected the art of delaying or denying treatment for sick people all in the name of the almighty dollar.
The lack of standards is truly astonishing as well. There are dozens of large companies vying for stimulus money to develop electronic medical records. Do you really think they'll be working together to provide a single solution that can be transported all over the country? These companies are also out to make a buck and it better serves their interests to develop the one standard format and be the holders of the golden goose than to work collaboratively on a solution that fits all (or most) needs. See: Blue Ray vs. HD-DVD or VHS vs. Beta-max. I would estimate that 9/10s of the stimulus money directed to these companies will be an utter waste, and the remaining 10th will got to produce fortune for a single organization.
Whenever a format *is* declared the winner, it will likely be so inadequate that it will be routinely altered and hacked to fit the specific needs of each institution. It will be rendered nearly useless. HL7 is great example of this. It's designed as the de facto format for transmitting health care information from one site to another, however, I have yet to see two institutions or vendors do it alike.
Pricing and billing are two other concerns. Both are seemingly completely arbitrary and vary widely from one facility and/or patient to the next. A simple lab procedure, let's say a white blood cell count (literally counting white blood cells), could be done in one location for X while in another location for 6X. The worst part, you have no way of knowing what that charge will be until you are billed. Then, if you have insurance, they get to choose whether to pay all, part or none of the bill based on what loopholes are available to them.
My personal opinion, I represent no one other than myself, is that the single most effective action that any government can do to help solve the health care problems is to do away with privatized health insurance as we Americans know it today and replace it with a system that is much more socially responsible. A standardized digital medical record will be a good thing, but it will likely show very little impact on patient care.
You make a good point that simply making charts digital is not enough. A good system detects errors, supports reporting after-the fact, and allows for good auditing. Our healthcare system has had an EMR for nearly a decade, and I've had a chance to see the growing pains and thrills over that time. Here are a few benefits that come to mind.
Auditing. I help an audit team look at who's pulling up whose records. With paper, this would be nearly impossible, but with electronic records it's quite easy to see that user X is pulling up the medical records of their ex-wife or the visiting famous person. Though this has been hard for some, I think it's made our organization much more respectful of a patient's privacy.
Moves. We moved our hospital recently and I got to write the system that tracked each patient as they went through the various staging areas to their new bed across town. Our EMR made this like tracking packages in FedEx and it worked great.
Widespread Communication. On a more practical note, this is the big one. It used to be very difficult to move charts and images around town or even to other cities. Now people anywhere in the sprawling healthcare system can see the latest on your medical condition.
Reporting. We have a massive data warehouse that lets us see the effect of our various health improvement efforts and gives us the ability to more accurately report quality data (e.g. are we giving asprin to everyone who comes in with chest pain?). Evidence based medicine is big in our organization, and it requires good data to support it.
Fixing Errors Before They Happen. This is the most challenging one, and I think we're still in our infancy. I helped make a lab cross-reference system whose purpose is to make sure nurses know what lab a doctor really ordered. If they ordered something vaguely cryptic, they can key in the lab name and it will give them the different names in different electronic systems, in addition to hand-entered names that some doctors use.
EMRs alone aren't going to improve healthcare greatly, but they open up a lot of other options that most certainly will.
This depends greatly on your threat model.
If the attacker is some guy with some cash and contacts and they want a photocopy of one person's medical record, chances are that paper will be easier to defeat. However, there is a substantial risk of getting caught (if the guy you approach who works in the file room doesn't take your bribe). If you do successfully bribe the clerk, however, nobody else will ever know about it (no access controls, audit trails, etc).
On the other hand, electronic records are vulnerable to some hacker in Indonesia who copies the records of 30 million patients from a NYC hospital without anybody even realizing that it had happened. Most likely the attacker didn't target any one patient or hospital in particular - in fact the security at 99% of all the hospitals was probably completely effective at keeping him out. However, since this was a trawl they will extort anybody of interest whose records they do get, and since somebody will mess up electronic security chances are there is someplace they'll manage to break into. A successful theft might even leave a trail - but most likely beyond the jurisdiction of whoever performed the theft. In fact, the theft victims might just get the guys home phone number when he calls to demand money - and they'll be powerless to do anything but pay it.
Paper and electronic both have strengths and weaknesses. The ways they are likely to fail from a security standpoint are very different.
I think what he was snarking at was the fact that HMOs are essentially a privatized form of socialized medicine, and that as the system shifts toward state-run socialized medicine, the problems we already see thanks to HMOs (where billing and CYA and HIPAA rule, while patient care takes a back seat) will magnify. Take my experience and expand it -- that's what Obama's programs will do.
I remember back before HMOs, when it was easy to find a doctor when you needed one, and when one doctor or set of doctors stayed with you for the duration. Now, it's all broken out into billable hours for the insurance companies, and appointments in the distant future even for urgent problems.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?