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Health Care Providers Failing To Adopt e-Records, Says RAND
Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in 2005, RAND Corporation published an analysis suggesting that hospitals and other health-care facilities could save more than $81 billion a year by adopting electronic health records. While e-records have earned a ton of buzz, the reality hasn't quite worked out: seven years later, RAND's new study suggests that health care providers have largely failed to upgrade their respective IT systems in a way that allows them to take full advantage of e-records. Meanwhile, the health care system in the United States continues to waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year, by some estimates. 'The failure of health information technology to quickly deliver on its promise is not caused by its lack of potential, but rather because of the shortcomings in the design of the IT systems that are currently in place,' Dr. Art Kellerman, senior author of the RAND study, wrote in a Jan. 7 statement. Slow pace of adoption, he added, has further delayed the productivity gains from e-records."
It has been my experience that every health care provider that I have dealt with that offers electronic records, also charges you an "administrative fee" to get a copy of said records at over $1 per page (regardless if it is an electronic document emailed to you).
Need an example? Altoona Regional Health System
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
My physician's office explicitly tells me why they stick with paper-only records: They don't want to deal with the data security mess. They are a medical office, not an IT shop.
Amazingly after all these years on paper records, I don't get double-billed, I've never had a problem between them and the insurance company, and they manage to handle my billing in a timely manner.
Go figure.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I am involved as a consultant to several practices and frankly the software stinks.
Buggy, incomplete, error prone, and over priced.
If I had a nickel for every time I have been told it will be fixed in the next release I would be a millionaire.
I feel sorry for the medical professionals who have to deal with the garbage software on a day to day basis and the consumers who get sub-par service both medical and billing because of it.
One example is:
If one thing is billed another is automatically added to the bill because they were often used together.
The problem: They are no longer recommended to be used together as a better and cheaper test has replaced one of them.
A year and a half later the problem is still in the software and if someone forgets to manually remove it the insurance rejects payment and the patient gets a bogus bill for several hundred dollars.