National Medical Records

By Author: Marcus Stalder
Total Articles: 491
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Go to most other first world countries and you will find a national electronic system for medical records. There's general agreement programs like this save lives. Yet, in the US, there's little or no sign there will even be comprehensive systems in individual states, let alone across the USA as a whole. What's happening and why?

Taking Germany as an example, its electronic records program aims to link more than 2,000 hospitals, 100,000 general practitioners, more than 20,000 pharmacies and the top 200 health insurers. So, with the click of a mouse, it will be possible to see each individual's medical history, all the relevant diagnoses and, most importantly, all the treatment prescribed. So, if anyone is brought into a hospital unconscious following an accident and he or she can be identified, it should be possible to discover whether there are any underlying medical problems, drug allergies or other issues that might affect the current treatment. It will also help control the abuse of medications because all prescription records will be collected together. It should also help improve diagnosis with each doctor able ...
... to see how and why earlier conditions were identified and treated. In some instances, it may also make it easier to identify previous errors in diagnosis. Hence, the program is not popular with doctors who fear their insurance premiums will rise if mistakes are found.

Progress in Germany has been slow with the different interest groups resisting the implementation, but real progress is now being made. Coming home, a new group calling itself the Care Connectivity Consortium is proposing basic steps to creating a wider system of information exchange. There are a number of influential members such as the Mayo Clinic, and the proposal starts with easing the transfer of electronic records from one doctor to another in all the affiliated group members. This should be a relatively simple software deal. After all, you can go into any outlet of a chain or franchise and, with a little negotiation with the software system, discover when you last stayed in a hotel, bought a burger, and so on. Cloud applications are everywhere with large organizations now processing and storing information online.

But there are real security problems with credit card and other large public and private organizations proving targets for hackers. Once you add in medical records, the damage to privacy could be real if there was a data breach. Worse, there's no agreement on who should pay for this electronic system. The hospitals might see it as an unnecessary overhead given the decades they have managed without. It's also not clear why insurers might want to pay for this resource. And, even if we solve all the problems of finance, we would then have to agree the format in which the information was to be stored. Getting everyone to agree on a single system is going to be a challenge. Under the circumstances, there's no prospect of a national medical records system. We will simply carry on as now, buying individual health insurance policies and hoping the doctors can talk to each other to agree on the right treatment. Health insurance plans do not require the exchange of perfect information. Until this changes, no one will pay for a better system.