That, as well as the cost.
Related posts:
- How the widespread adoption of electronic medical records can raise health care costs
- Could privacy laws and bureaucracy derail universal electronic health records?
- The low adoption rate of electronic records
- The slow adoption of electronic records
- Paying doctors by the hour will increase the adoption of electronic medical records
- Why health IT and electronic medical records are so misguided
- Will electronic records actually increase health costs?
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{ 4 comments }
Mostly the cost. First the hardware and software purchase, then the maintenance fees and finally the losses in efficiency while the system is introduced, which can typically take a year or more while staff are trained in the system use and old paper files are digitized so that they can be retained in the database for future reference. Unless a practice has multiple locations and a need for access to data stored centrally, the benefits are more to the insurers and Medicare who are afforded more direct communications to their information systems. As for patient records being “portable”, that presumes that there are uniform or at least compatible standards between all the many systems in the market, and what presently exists at hospitals, insurance companies, pharmacies and doctors offices. Is there?
Doubtful.
Privacy is a red herring. The real issue is that these systems are very expensive and the entities that stand to benefit most by their implementation do not want to pay for it. What they are trying to do is impose the implementation and the costs on the doctors without offering to increase reimbursement to cover the costs. As things stand, why blame private practices for resisting?
Ditto, anonymous, for a 2 MD group office, the costs are daunting.
typical. a lwayers blog. Cost is what stops me, not privacy. Just like this HIpAA nonsense. It’s jsut what the lawyers feed off of.
I just wish as a patient that there would be a way to opt out. I don’t want my physician accessing my medical record from his house. He may have a ton of spyware on his computer. How good is his virus protection? Does he even have it? What happens when there’s a computer glitch and they can’t access the record (this DOES happen from time to time – I’ve worked in a hospital that uses electronic medical records. That means until the system is back up and operational then they can’t access ANY information needed for patient care – no labs, no history, no medications, nothing.) These are questions that really bother me.
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