Digitizing Health Records

Obama's recent stimulus bill calls for 19 billion to be spent in modernizing health care with the ambitious goal of computerizing all health records in the next 5 years. It won't be easy. Currently only a few percent of the 5,000 or so U.S. hospitals today use comprehensive electronic health records. Only about 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. We will also be confronted with new privacy concerns for patients and require a huge dearth of skilled workers to build and implement the necessary technology.Source

The $19 billion in funding for health-care information technology and other provisions outlined in the new stimulus bill will directly address the two major hurdles to adoption--the cost to implement and maintain the records, and the difficulty of exchanging information among various health-care providers' differing computer systems. Source

The thinktank RAND believes that such a plan could cost at least $75 billion to $100 billion over the ten years they think the hospitals would need to implement program.Source

Medical professionals have been home-monitoring patients for vital data such as blood pressure, heart rate, and other data gleaned from monitoring devices for many years. Now some major software companies are also pitching in. Google and IBM recently unveiled software that allows people to stream their health data drawn from personal medical devices such as heart rate monitors directly to their own electronic databases.Source

New ways to organize and visualize this dearth of health records will be a task that won't go away.