Electronic Medical Records!
The Obama Administration is right on in focusing in on Electronic Medical Records, as the first step in improving and cutting costs in Healthcare!
Compared to other Verticals, Healthcare in the U.S, is one of the most backward in adopting technology, and improving the efficiency, and effectiveness of their operations.
Almost of a third of every healthcare dollar spent is accounted for in wasteful, repetitive, redundant, and manual work.
Healthcare providers like clinics and doctors need to deal with exchanging medical information and billing information back and forth with hundreds of Insurance Companies. A lot of this information is still in paper form, and gets copied, faxed, scanned and sent across manually or electronically. At the other end, someone needs to enter this informaion all over again into their systems.
To say that this is wasteful is an understatement. Electronic Medical Records perform miracles overnight and all to the benefit of the end customer, the patient.
I can attest to this from personal experience with Kaiser Permananente in CA the past five years or more.
On an average my own visit to the Kaiser Clinic takes me a fraction of the time it used to take before.
Five years ago, I set up a visit with my personal physician. She writes me some tests on a piece of paper. I take it to the lab. They key it in and I wait. They complete the tests and I wait. They send the results to my physician on paper and I wait. My physician writes me a paper prescription. I take it to the pharmacy in the same building. They need to enter this into their system. I wait. Then I get my medicines and I come home.
Has taken me about four hours or more, if everything were done on the same day!
Fast Forward. All of Kaiser's physicians have a computer now, in every visiting room. She scans my membership card. It brings up my whole history. She scans it quickly and prescribes some tests right there on the system. I go to the labs. They scan my card and it prints out the labels for the vials of blood also with barcodes! The results are entered by the lab techs, directly into the system and are visible to me at home over their web site. It even sends me an email when the results come in for the first time. I can see it before the doctor can also! What I will do with those results is another question!
Prescriptions are entered into the system by the physician. No more dealing with errors dur to bad handwriting. The names of drugs, dosages are all selectable from pulldown menus! At the pharmacy, they scan my card and they know what I am there for. I get my prescriptions in 10 minutes and I am out of there.
These days my visits are no more than an hour including tests and prescriptions.
Now visits are shorter, better, makes me happier, and also are safer because manual errors are eliminated with elimination of manual inputs at various stages of the medical visit.
Of course, Kaiser is a HMO provider but by extensions you can imagine the automation of health care claims being automatically sent to multiple Insurance carriers without any manual redundant, inputs, and consequent errors.
Electronic Medical Records take a big chunk of waste out of the heatlcare system. At a time when the world is looking for newer innovations to spur new growth in technology areas and new employment, EMR could be one of the promising avenues.
Willful waste brings woeful want. - Thomas Fuller
It’s funny how contentious issues play out: There’s the real evidence about the effectiveness of electronic health records, and then there’s the hype. We tend to hear more about the promise, less about what has been proven.
With EHR, what’s been proven is that having doctors in hospitals use the computer to enter orders that are legible, with the correct decimal point, and that can’t be mistaken, reduces medication errors dramatically. Further, the turnaround time from when an order is written until when the medication is delivered to the patient can be markedly reduced.
Just putting computers into a broken healthcare system makes it faster and more expensive – and still broken. We have other things to fix as we implement these systems if we're to accomplish effective reform. EHR is perhaps part of the solution but not the silver bullet. More at http:// www.healthcaretownhall.com/?p=93
It's already expensive--that's not going to improve. We need the whole of the medical community to implement electronic records and come into the 21st century. Alternately, the last thing we need is for healthcare to go backwards to the archaic "physician as gatekeeper" model we got rid of that shackles people to a Primary Care Physician before being able to seek a specialist or even visit the emergency room. Healthcare in Canada and UK attest to the futility and risk this model poses. This model is inefficient, costly (due to it's repetative structure), can pose a risky delay, and is absolutely ridiculous.