Cost savings passed on to consumers? I'll believe that when I see it.

Well for 20 BILLION, it better create tens of thousands of jobs!

Or we could keep slogging along with a health care system where 20-25% (from the Rand study) of the doctors and hospitals are bogged down with paper records or at best, localized data, rather than a broad and more efficient health care IT infrastructure.

One thing about computerizing all this data is that the system will probably be hacked at some point and the info manipulated, exploited or sold for profit somehow.

the price of progress.

Should we shut down all ATM machines and return to the days of more manual tellers in banks because of potential hacking, data exploitation?

It's pie in the sky feel good stuff. I work at a number of places that use computerized record making it hasn't saved patients a dime and it costs thousands to maintain and update. It does give you an occassional longer coffee break. How does the data get into the computer you ask? Oh, yea, that's right SOMEONE HAS TO TYPE IT IN. It is not always faster, in some cases it does. There are so many problems with it I could go on and on. The only people who will profit are IT guys who can interface with companies who already specialize in medical record keeping and there are hundreds of companies out there.

Technology improves efficiency in any sector in a national and global economy.

Efficiency saves money.

I have not seen it. Not in the medical profession. One hospital I worked at introduced automated records in 1995. We spent more time fixing what it recorded than doing it. Made some slick records but that was about it.

I understand that you accept the unsubstantiated and undocumented opinion of the editorial writer and/or your own limited anecdotal experience over Rand studies or Harvard studies.

We know they are part of the vast left wing conspiracy to take over your life.:eek:

How do you figure that. I speak as an end user of automated record keeping. It has many problems. When I start to see Obama give away money for people to purchase the programs, have them installed, and have them pay for the continual upgrades, fixes, and trouble shooting to interface the way they should, we can talk. Until then they are blowing smoke up everyones skirt.

For some reason I don't think that Obama's plan includes giving this stuff away to Dr's, Hospitals, or other private health care facilities.

I would think that is the $20 billion in the stimululs bill that I think is a good investment for short term jobs and longer term efficiencies in the health care system.

As I said....it's your experience versus numerous medical professionals with equal or more experience and expertise.

You chose the former..I chose the latter.

And as you said...time will tell.

devils/ Should we? There were a lot less problems and that would probably create more jobs, wouldn't it?/advocate

problems v convenience

bank tellers v it technicians.

No, those are people who crunch numbers. Not end users. Look behind the people who push the research on electronic medial record keeping and you will find the companies who benifit from it paying for the research.

The Harvard guy is an end-user:
I dont take the numbers at face value, but I do take the concept at face value.

"1,000 doctors in Massachusetts to go electronic, creating 20 new jobs in the process."

WOW! 20 jobs! Boy I bet that put Massachusetts on the Map in Job Creation! And I be it did cost them millions.

You like cherry picking, huh?

200,000 jobs nationwide.

I bet you like the horse and buggy too!

Yea, If I owned a Corp that grossed 1.4 billion annually I would be pushing for electronic medical records too...

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-1059240.html

Like I said, behind every person who does research and calls them self a Doctor while pushing a platform is a multimillion dollar company.
I don't take buzz names like "Harvard Medical School" as proof of efficiency. Nice try though.

I wouldnt expect any other response! ;)

While you ignore this guy helps run a company that makes 1.4 billion. Yea, thats some cheap health care right there. Guess who paid for that? Patients and insurance companies.

And check this out paranoids. This is the same doctor that wants to put a chip in all of you.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/hard...9272554,00.htm

Hey it might be a good idea. Who is going to make the money on that technology?

I dont have time now to read the full interview.

Can you post the Q&A section where he said he wants to put a chip in all of us. It looks to me like he said he is also for opting out if a patient chooses.

I'll check back later to see the section you post.

Thanks!

I am not against computerized medical records. That is not the point here. The point is does it decrease costs? Does it save time? My response is not at first. Maybe over a long period of time it will. Start up costs are EXTREMELY expensive. A brand new Dell computer is now at every bedside all over the hospital all connected via hard wire to a main server, bet that was cheap. I know that in many cases it will decrease medical errors and that in the long run saves millions alone. But with all good comes some trade offs.

And then there are the people who are making money off of it, the same people telling us all how great it is going to be for us:

http://govhealthit.com/Articles/2007...ding-edge.aspx

I am sure they gave it to Microsoft at a discount, you know for the good of the patient and skyrocketing costs of healthcare.

TAIL POST
 

This is light-years from practical implementation. And I say that as a person working on the front lines of integrating healthcare IT systems--I'm a PACS admin, I work under the IHE umbrella of interoperability standards such as DICOM and HL7 (which are poorly implemented by vendors who see propietary functionality as leverage against their competitors, and frankly, the customer having control of their own data). Healthcare IT is struggling to progress past the dark ages.

Say it brother, this time louder.

The military has gone kicking and screaming into the process. Due to the size and cost of these projects PER HOSPITAL, the money is allocated years before, which means that the purchase is made one year, and implemented sometimes 2 or more years later. Guess what? They don't get the free up grade. We are using Essentris. It is working. Guess what? The year after the bought this program they bought a different one. Next year they take this one out and everyone has to learn the new one. Oh, and Essentris DOES NOT INTERFACE with CHCS except in a very limited way. It does not interface with the outpatient notes program CHCS2 Alta. So now we have three programs that are required to take care of one patient. None of them interface with the monitors. No real time data. Guess what? We use a paper chart for that stuff.

The whole idea that Obama is going to pour money into the health care system and the private system at that is bullcrap. And if he does it is not going to fix it, but it will make a small group of people very very rich. So the private plastic surgery center is going to get free government money to go all electronic with their records? How about the privately owned doctors hospital? How about that 3000 bed inter-city hospital. Does anyone know just how much it would cost to wire up a 3000 bed hospital with computers, laptops, hard wire, training, programs, updates, onsite trainers, IT trouble shooters, etc.? The public is getting smoke blown up its collective skirt.

Let's be clear here. I am not against electronic records. It has merits if properly implemented.

That's me. And I'll tell you. The big healthcare IT vendors are not structured to support implementations at smaller, rural facilities such as ourselves. The problem is that the basic infrastructure of a "paperless" hospital is NOT SCALABLE. (Because of the small size and lower volume of our facility, our resources in the IT department are very limited. However, we still have to build all the same systems and interfaces etc. as the larger facilities--which the big vendors are "tuned" to.)

This doesn't even approach the real issue: that the vendors approach the established standards of interoperability as a set of very loose suggestions, that they skirt or downright ignore at their discretion.

Throwing money at this problem isn't going to fix a broken industry. The solution will only come when the vendors adhere to the interoperability standards THAT ALREADY EXIST AND HAVE BEEN PROVEN TO WORK IF IMPLEMENTED PROPERLY.

Until that time, you will continue to need high-paid guys such as myself to stitch your disparate systems together.

We lost 623,000 jobs last month.

And how much of this bill is going to vanish along the way?

It only costs me $65,000 a year, everything included, to create a job for a journeyman mechanic.

Why does it cost so fucking much for this bill to create each job?

If you've got something for that mechanic to do.

When I do, I hire one. But there's no need for me to spend a few million per employee.

Especially when that few million is actually just going to vanish.

Well you just let ole Redux know that 20 jobs were created in MA after millions spent so he can feel better about making a bunch of IT savy docs multi-millionares will ya?

:mad2:

Too late now...its a done deal!

Some IT companies are gonna provide jobs and get richer in the process...and the Obama administration is gonna take over your life :eek:

AHA!

:lol:

Too funny.

yep, you said it bro, and I can't wait to blame them for the next 4 years of fuckups and failures. :lol:

Should be as much fun as the last 8 years of fuckups and failures, anyway.

Yea turn around is certainly fairplay. As long as it goes both ways I am cool with it.

I hate both sides. When Bush was in, I ripped on him...because he was The Beast. A big, stupid brute with the morals of a shark and the political instinct of a syphilis spirochete. But in the end, he was a monster we could live with, albeit in a most embarrassed fashion.

But that isn't what we've elected this time, is it? Ho ho!

whore is right.

a "national electronic medical record"
 

People, here's the reality: you can't even pull up your x-rays from hospital A while you're at hospital B, even if hospital B is right across the street--much less another state. The two simplest reasons that spring to mind are NOT because we haven't invested billions into healthcare IT (because, believe me, we have).

They are: #1 Hospitals view your medial information as proprietary business data. Sure, you can sign a HIPAA form to get the data released, but they sure aren't going to let a BUSINESS COMPETIOR (i.e. another hospital) have free, unfettered access to data that they had to make an investment of time and money generate. To put it simply: HOSPITALS DO NOT WANT TO SHARE YOUR MEDICAL RECORDS. It's not a smart business choice.

And: #2 If the hundred hospitals from this county, and the next, and the next, and the thousands from the next state over, and so on and so forth, wanted to share your medical records... HOW WOULD THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE? We are still struggling with getting every department WITHIN THE SAME FACILITY to use a common medical record number. It's not that the interoperability standards aren't attempting to deal with this, but what good are these efforts when the technology vendors fight to maintain the proprietray nature of their systems, so that you are compelled not to purchase another brand, lest you have to deal with a costly migration to untangle all the proprietary data you've been storing?

This is just an off-the-cuff rant; but the point is that this kind of thing IS MY JOB. This is what I do every day. There is no magic solution that a few billion dollars or a few hundred billion dollars is going to bring about. The healthcare industry is designed NOT to share data.

here, here.

Just one man's viewpoint from squarely within a situation which is probably nothing more than a soundbyte to most people.

I have tums everywhere atm.

Flint, for the last 15 years I have watched the gobberment and large health care companies throw millions into making this work. I have not seen a single one that worked smoothly enough to make me stand back as an end user and say, wow, that really makes my job so much easier. Not one.

Thanks for editing this post. Mine doesn't make much sense now. :( lol

Tough luck, kid!

Well people can just wonder and speculate now. There's a fair bit of that around here anyway. :)

Very interesting take Flint, on the real world implications of something that sounds great on the surface, but is apparently completely impractical to implement.

If this is the case and I believe it is, why are we trying to spend so much money on something that isn't feasible?

Classic, obviously I can't answer for Flint, but IMHO it is a notable and worth while issue to take on. But most people never thought about throwing money at this program until Obama picked it up as a campaign issue. I feel they cherry picked it as something to show the public that they are addressing a health care issue to make them feel good in the spending package all the while the problem of the under and un-insured, among many other things, has not go away. People in health care have been exposed the digital and electronic record keeping for more than 15 years. This is not a new issue. There are huge problems and it centers around the issues that Flint brought up about proprietary information and lack of interoperability. None of those issues are fixed by throwing money at them. All they are doing is making a very small group of people very rich.

Ouch. That one is going to hurt.

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/84712

Good thing our hospitals never make mistakes.

It's not about mistakes. It is about throwing millions, or in our case with Obama, billions at a problem hoping the solution just works it self out for digital record keeping in health care.

Ever try to get your medical records?

The system as is, sucks. Not that I'm really big on anything in the StealFromUs package.

Yea, since I work in the hospital it is easier for me than most, but even my family can't get theirs without a blessing from the Pope. Now if you want a copy for a referral appt that is in 2 days they can let you process a request and you can get it in 2 weeks, maybe.

The one good thing is our Radiology Dept went all digital so radiological tests which involve dye can be obtained on a disk and other providers can actually view the test. The turn around to get those copied was 15 min. Radiology has always been on the cutting edge of the digital revolution in health care, 5 or more years ahead of the rest of the herd.

Thing is, trying to FORCE that is like trying to push a string.

And yet, those of us in Radiology say things like: "Witness the very nature of DICOM itself, the most non-standard standard that ever existed."

OOPS! I meant to say medicaid, fixed it.