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Cost Saving Electronic Medical Records

Made of Unicorn Farts and Pixie Dust

By: Aaron Gardner (Diary)  |  June 16th, 2010 at 10:22 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

You may remember, in February of this year, the Obama Administration announced $975 million in grants to help states, doctors and hospitals move from paper to computerized record-keeping. That is almost a billion dollars.

That’s ok though because, as AP pointed out then via ABC…

Studies show electronic medical records help reduce medical errors and improve the quality of patient care. The grant money comes from the economic stimulus passed by Congress last year and is part of a push to get health care providers to adopt electronic record-keeping.

The White House says the awards will help make electronic record-keeping technologies available to more than 100,000 hospitals and primary care physicians by the year 2014 while helping train thousands of people for careers in health care and information technology.

Studies show? Well, let’s look into the future via my time machine*, across the pond to the UK and the NHS.


Electronic patient care records will require an “enormous effort” and a “high cost” to fulfil their potential, a study warns.

Enormous effort and high cost, I would say so. This is a £12bn upgrade to the NHS IT systems alone and it is threatening to go over its £200m annual budget. All of this to push a system that nobody apparently wants.

To date, just 1.2m patients have had their records uploaded although 30m have received letters informing them about the system.

And that’s in a total target pool of 50 million, how many are we shooting for?

Government run health care, in all it’s forms, is the political equivalent of a boat. It’s pretty to look at, it’s fun to say you have; but the reality is – it will drain every last dollar from your pocket.

And it’s not just me saying this, studies show…

Lead author Professor Trisha Greenhalgh said: “This research shows that the significant benefits anticipated for these programmes have, by and large, yet to be realised.”

… not all that glitters is gold, not all things anticipated come to pass. Especially when those things are anticipated by elites so far removed from reality that they have begun believing their own bull.

Who wants to lay a wager that 2014 comes and passes without significant results from that $975 million in grants? And by significant, I mean at least 40% participation. How about on how much they will ask for to be able to complete it by, say, 2020?

Aaron B. Gardner

* I truly believe that the NHS and all it’s horrors await at the end of the path Obama has put us upon.

Crossposted at Conservative Punditry

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COMMENTS

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  • Locked and Loaded

    Now, isn’t that the real reason for electronic medical records? The feds hype error reduction and improvement in care, because they would like for us to just submit willingly.

  • val1198

    I go to a private doctor and pay on the spot. No insurance company or anyone else involved. Never will any medical provider, pharmacist or dentist be able to see every detail of my life.

  • callawyn

    The bureaucracy will be far more complicated, infinitely more politicized and more incompetent as well. What’s the current count on new boards & agencies created by PPACA, 159? With D’s in charge, the fix for every problem that makes the news seems to be creation of a new agency, no matter how redundant, so I’m sure that’ll be just the tip of the iceberg.

    Worse, England and other countries with socialized medicine that have destroyed any incentive for innovation simply adopt innovations made in the US. If we become like Europe, who steps up to take our place developing new procedures, equipment and pharmaceuticals?

  • southernilpat

    How you pay and whether you have insurance has nothing to do with your medical record. Many if not most physicians already use some form of EMR because it’s simply better than paper records. No trying to go back and interpret horrible handwriting, or waiting for some transcriptionist to decode the doc’s dication and hopefully getting the transcription inserted into the correct record. I’m pretty darn sure your pharmacist uses electronic records. Every dentist I’ve seen recently does, too.

    The problem is that they are trying to take the control of your record out of your hands, and tie all these records together whether you want it or not. For your own good, of course, because in their minds you are too stupid to keep track of your own life.

  • http://56rebels.wordpress.com/ 56rebels

    “Government run health care, in all it

  • Common_Cents

    Why doesn’t anyone point this out and expose the real reason being more govt control?

  • ObamaNo

    Because of this new EMR and HCR, I have lost the business I worked 17 years to grow. I was an independent contractor to doctor groups and clinics as a medical transcriptionist. I have worked from home for all of these years which kept my overhead low. Those savings were passed onto my doctors. They did not have to pay employee costs or taxes.

    I was informed a couple of months ago that because of HCR the group of doctors I was working for would have to go with a far more expensive service. Because of this, their medical documentation costs are tripling or quadrupling and I’ve lost my source of income. Their records are now a mess and for what?

    Oh, but I am comforted by the fact that I have a husband with a good job that he’s had for 20 years except it is associated with an ISP. If the FCC does what they are threatening to do, his job could be history, too.

    Yep, we are loving that hope and change. How about you?

  • drfredc

    My dental clinic has been using digital records for almost ten years. If you’ve got the right software, it can save a lot of time and space.

    Going digital has a steep learning curve for clinicians and staff. Most adapt quickly, some don’t. Good software can help detect mistakes; it’s easy to move records around the clinic without them getting lost or misplaced, which can happen to paper records, etc, etc.

    IMHO, most of those opposed to digital records are clueless fearmongers, at least as far as records stored in any particular clinic setting goes. Now, if the Feds were in charge of data and required a common standard charting and software system rather than letting marketplace evolution take place, that might be different.

  • acat

    but, being inside the industry – computers and software, that is – I am concerned about digital records – especially in smaller practices, or practices with high turn-over. It’s great that software can catch mistakes, but it can also reproduce mistakes – especially in the hands of people who are poorly trained.

    Electronic records also introduce new opportunities for fraud and abuse for the unethical. They also make the loss of a backup tape, smaller than a tube of toothpaste, into a much larger problem – more like losing an entire filing cabinet.

    So. Maybe I’m a clueless fearmonger. Could be. More likely, I’m someone who has made this his job, and has seen some of the pitfalls before.

    Mew

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