Several thoughts —
EMRs *ARE* a good idea.
EPIC *does* act like an 800 pound gorilla, and makes a decent end-to-end solution as long as you buy EVERYTHING from EPIC, and do it their way, NOT following your protocols.
ICD-10 is well-intentioned, but places a big burden on the Provider from a data entry standpoint.
Meaningful Use is not by itself a bad idea, because IF it is ever realized your health records will be your own, and WILL be portable from provider to provider. The P in HIPAA does stand for portability after all.
YMMV.
If my doctor wants to enter my data into a system that ever is available to the government, I’ll tell him in advance that I’ll just lie.
When he puts down the mouse we can chat.
I used to have Kaiser and the Doctor spent way more time looking at the computer screen than she did with me. It would be irritating but I know she worked for them and it was required of her.
She couldn’t recommend some things until she had me go through certain other things first, and admitted to me that it was stupid. Kaiser worked closely with HHS in developing Obamacare.
A lot of Dr’s are going to cash only to avoid the cost of EMR
This guy knows what he is talking about and is right on the money.
An EMR is vital to efficient administration of healthcare in a large institution, but the government mandates, PQRS, ICD10, the hideous and damnable "Meaningful Use" crap, and a lot of that stuff with all the government mandates is absolute, bloated garbage that makes it nearly impossible to configure and implement a system that does what it should, which is positively assist in the administration of quality healthcare.
There are a lot of aspects to the changes in healthcare since 2008 that people outside of medicine are largely unaware of, and most of those things are not good.
I was briefly discussing the issue of how the practice of medicine is changing with a physician today and he told me that one of the major issues of doctors is autonomy and how they highly value it.
I had my “annual” physical last week. I put annual in quotes since it was postponed by my Dr. for a year due to scheduling. He told me that he used to put symptoms that were discussed with patients into their files. Now they have to be coded into a data base. The data base has been expanded by Obamacare from a start of about a hundred items until it is now over ten thousand. He has had to hire special technical editors to translate the discussed items into the code. He has also had to expand his scheduling to one hour per patient, not to spend more time with the patients, but to spend time doing the paperwork. Hence, the scheduling issues.
The website is bad enough but this is where 0bamaCare is really going to do some damage. And blowback!
This is not surprising in the least. Read what I wrote about this last March here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3000661/posts?page=1#1
They couldn’t do it in 1995 and they can’t do it now.
It could be done of course. But not by a bunch of government twits.
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.....
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.