Electronic Medical Records

[MorGrendel]

President-Elect Urges Electronic Medical Records in 5 Years
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/President4 ... 536&page=4

Kinda sad, since congress passed a bill requiring this by 2010. Though we've seen how HIPAA works . . . Walk into any emergency room and look for a whiteboard. You'll see who's in the ER and their other vitals.

[Rachel]

I hope they actualy do get it done. One of my professors was somehow involved in this I think. She advocated for it as one of the many neccisary fixes for our broken health care system. A large percent (I can't remember the # right now) of the money paid for health care goes into basicly beauocarcy. This is suposed to help cut that down. Perhaps you can think back to the last time you tryed to have your records transfered from one doctor to another, maybe you've not had the same experiance, but from what I recall its quite a headache. This should help with that too. Privacy could be a problem, but everything always has problems, this could improve care/save lives.

[Berserker]

It can be done. SSA has done it and doctors that work with SSA are strongly encouraged towards it. I'm sure this will be done.

[MorGrendel]

Oh, believe me, it can be done . . . it's a part of what my company does. You should see what Shock Trama has done with this technology, simply amazing. MDACC and Johns Hopkins as well. What stops it, GREED. The infrastucture is cheap in comparison to almost any technological advance in medicine. However, hospital CFO's look for a hand out from the Gov't, or refuse to cut into there profit margins, and state they won't buy in until everyone buys in knowing that small practices can't afford it straight out. This is a top-down process, just lik the rest of medicine.

[Rachel]

of course. and yea I wrote a paper on e-ICUs its neat stuff. The very first article I read had a bunch of comments from whiners saying oh how cold that is, though in other areas this technology decreased mortality rate by a quarter. Sorry I'll take being monitored by a doctor in another state via video & such over dying unattnded any day.