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Federal Deadline Hobbling eHealth IT Rollout
Lucas123 writes "A federal deadline that begins next year and requires hospitals to prove they're meaningfully using electronic health records will lead to technical problems and data errors affecting patient care, say politicians and top IT professionals responsible for the deployments. Physicians and hospitals have until the end of 2011 to receive the maximum federal incentive monies to deploy the technology. If not deployed by 2015, they face penalties through cuts in Medicare reimbursements. 'I think we have nontechnology people making decisions about technology,' said Gregg Veltri, CIO at Denver Health. 'I wonder if anybody understands the reality of IT systems and how complex they are, especially when they're integrated together. You're going to sacrifice quality if you increase the speed [of the rollout].'"
We're talking about the US Federal Government here. In particular, the CMMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Security). You get all three.
"Ggovernment is bad" sock puppet, we're talking about private-sector insurance here. CMMS has a fraction of the administrative costs of the private sector. I've worked at private insurance companies: the business processes and technology is frequently appalling.
Stop chanting the "privatization is good" mantra--some of those who grew up in the Reagan era (such as myself) and were diehard conservatives (such as myself) understand that sometimes, private industry is NOT the answer.
On the other hand, look at the digital TV transition debacle.
If you don't set a deadline and enforce it, difficult technology implementations tend to drag on forever.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Clearly there are a lot of people here posting about how the government should not be getting involved and that seems to be the bias of both the article and summary. Allow me to go into some personal experience here though. As someone who has been very ill, lack of standardized medical records and the inability of various hospitals to transfer digital copies of video and images resulted in my spending another month or so of my life in a state I would not wish upon anyone. Right now a very good friend of mine works in healthcare and they have been (I shit you not) writing down patient information on recipe cards as the one and only method of storing drug prescription info. This resulted in, by her count, several hundred patients not getting needed insulin, antipsychotics, and other drugs as a result of numerous ordering errors that were never caught and were impossible to search for. So when people say digitizing medical records in a standard fashion is going to result in problems for patients... well not doing it is resulting in the very same.
I'm not big on government interference with many parts of our lives, but they are addressing a very real problem and they're doing it with kid gloves. They did not pass regulations requiring hospitals to comply, they just tied federal funding to that compliance and gave the hospitals many years in which to get their shit together. If medical providers have not done so and are rushing about now, that is absolutely not the fault of the feds.
Because it's the private sector receiving that money to build an infrastructure that meets the government requirements.
Or to put it more simply:
* Government give money to hospital.
* Hospital supposed to use money to build computing infrastruture that makes medical records / insurance easier to process.
* Hospital say "five year deadline too fast; we too stupid/bureaucratic to build infrastructure. We need more time so that money can be hidden / wasted / embezzled."
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.