Posted on 10/23/2013 5:00:19 PM PDT by neverdem
Edited on 10/23/2013 6:38:07 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The only ones to really benefit from EMR’s were the companies that wrote the software and sold it to doctors and hospitals. Not even necessary for sales staff to leave their office when you have a product mandated by the government and only a very few approved suppliers.
The ICD 10 issue is a real fiasco. Insurance carriers incorporated the change into their systems months and months ago but its implementation keeps getting postponed because - surprise, surprise - Medicare is not ready.
Whatever possible good comes from EMR, it is overshadowed by the possible evil that can be done, and will eventually be done because the data is now in the hands of an unaccountable bureaucracy.
I work in healthcare. The VA has had programmers on staff for years developing an EMR that could be used interchangeably across the VA system. They have full-time programmers on staff.
They could have rolled this out nationally for free to all hospitals as a default program if they were truly interested in a national record (whether we want to go here or not - and we don’t - that’s a different issue).
Instead, they required hospitals to buy programs at a cost of $15-50 million to be compliant with the EMR mandate. (I’m not even talking about what doctors must buy, just hospitals).
Why force the buying of all this tech if they have a template in the VA system that they could have rolled out, for free?
Skin in the game.
Repeal Obamacare now, and every hospital in this country will scream about the millions they were forced to pour into this already. The intent here was to grow deep roots into Obamacare long before the official roll out at the barrel end of a very expensive mandate.
Your doctors and hospitals have been putting skin in this game for about 1.5 years now. They are full of very well connected local pols and movers and shakers.
These people don’t call their congresscritter. They sit down to meals with him.
And you wonder why it seems that even the pubbies aren’t particularly invested in standing up to this fight.
I have to say that belonging to a medical consortium as the one I’m in in south Jersey can have a lot of advantages - my cardiologist can call up the results of the blood tests the GP ordered and the GP can check the history of my medications from the cardiologist with no trouble on their laptops whenever needed - but it’s a well tested and verified system - the thought of that data being accessible to anyone outside the group, especially to the government through a government run network, is frightening.....
.....you wonder why even the pubbies aren’t particularly invested in standing up to this fight.......Repeal Obamacare now, and every hospital in this country will scream about the millions they were forced to pour into this. The intent here was to grow deep roots into Obamacare long before its official roll out at the barrel end of a very expensive (politically botched) mandate....doctors and hospitals have been putting skin in this game for about 1.5 years now.....(duped by) very well connected local pols, and movers and shakers.
Amazing to me that trained, highly-educated doctors and h/c professionals actually bought into this monstrosity----had no clue it would end up being a debacle. The sap-happy faith in the promises of deluded power-crazed pols like Obama is shocking.
SHL - agreed. The Trojan horse inside HIPAA security and privacy regs is the loophole about government access.
I know, I know. And the PPACA makes it worse.
Privacy is an illusion in Obamacare. Pelosi said so.
When I called a doctor I’d never seen before, the call in person knew more about me than they should have access to. Now the doc does not want to see me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.