Posted on 10/23/2015 5:23:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
Hey, who's up for a stiff dose of "See, I told you so?"
For the past several years, medical professionals have warned that the federal electronic medical records mandate -- buried in the trillion-dollar Obama stimulus of 2009 -- would do more harm than good. Their diagnosis, unfortunately, is on the nose.
The Quack-in-Chief peddled his tech-centric elixir as a cost-saving miracle. "This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests," he crowed at the time. In theory, of course, modernizing record-collection is a good idea, which many private health care providers had already adopted before the Healer of All Things took office.
But in the clumsy, power-grabbing hands of Washington bureaucrats, Obama's one-size-fits-all EMR regulations have morphed into what one expert called "healthcare information technology's version of cash-for-clunkers."
I reported in 2012 how my own primary care physician quit her regular practice and converted to "concierge care" because of the meddlesome EMR burden. Untold numbers of docs across the country have done the same.
In 2013, health care analysts at the RAND Corporation admitted that their cost-savings predictions of $81 billion a year were vastly inflated.
In 2014, RAND researchers interviewed doctors who spotlighted "important negative effects" of the EMR mandate on "their professional lives and, in some troubling ways, on patient care. They described poor EHR usability that did not match clinical workflows, time-consuming data entry, interference with face-to-face patient care, and overwhelming numbers of electronic messages and alerts."
And the hits keep coming.
Robert Wachter, author of the recently published "The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age," chronicled the damage he's witnessed: "Physicians retiring early. Small practices bankrupted by up-front expenses or locked into ineffective systems by the prohibitive cost of switching. Hours consumed by onerous data entry unrelated to patient care. Workflow disruptions. And above all, massive intrusions on our patient relationships."
The American Medical Association, which foolishly backed Obamacare, is now balking at top-down government intrusion into their profession. Better late than never. The group launched a campaign called "Break the Red Tape" this summer to pressure D.C. to pause the new medical-record rules as an estimated 250,000 physicians face fines totaling $200 million a year for failing to comply with "meaningful use" EMR requirements.
In Massachusetts last month, physicians decried the failure to achieve true "interoperability" between EMR systems despite a $30 billion federal investment through the Obama stimulus. Dr. Dennis Dimitri, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, noted at a rancor-filled town hall that the mandate has "added significant time to the daily life of most physicians in their practices," WBUR reported. "It has not necessarily lived up to expectations in terms of its ability to provide cues to physicians to make sure that necessary treatments are not being missed. It has certainly not been able to swiftly disseminate information from one clinical setting to another."
That's in no small part due to the cronyism embedded in the federal stimulus "incentives" -- a massive chunk of which the White House doled out to behemoth EMR company Epic Systems, headed by Obama crony Judith Faulkner. As I've noted repeatedly in this column the past three years, Epic continues to be plagued by both industry and provider complaints about its creaky, closed-end system and exorbitant fee structure to enable the very kind of interoperability the Obama EMR mandate was supposed to ensure.
Now, even left-wing Mother Jones magazine reports this week that "instead of ushering in a new age of secure and easily accessible medical files, Epic has helped create a fragmented system that leaves doctors unable to trade information across practices or hospitals. That hurts patients who can't be assured that their records -- drug allergies, test results, X-rays -- will be available to the doctors who need to see them. This is especially important for patients with lengthy and complicated health histories."
The Obama White House has responded by doubling down on its destructive EMR rules that punish both patients and providers. Congress must intervene. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, introduced a bill Thursday to repeal the draconian penalties "so that providers can get back to the business they are uniquely trained to do -- utilizing their skills and knowledge to heal the sick and support the continued vitality of the healthy."
Prescription: Butt out, Washington. Primum non nocere.
Technology is NEVER a substitute for good management (decision making)
It’s all about government control and decidin
g who lives and who dies.
It’s why my doctor had to leave his clinic for a health care conglomerate, and then retire, leaving me with a registered nurse for treatment.
Not to mention I receive a notice from a group thathat my medical records along with thousands of others were potentially hacked. I get free credit monitoring for two years. Nice
Everyone has a useless Patient Portal at every physician’s site now that no one checks into. The cost of running these Obama ideas is millions, which is added to the cost of health care, again proving he knows absolutely nothing about how business works. What an ignorant bunch of voters we have in this country, who thought a community organizer/Big Government parasite would be able to bring about Utopia for the masses!
My doctor spends more time looking at the computer than he spends looking at me.
I recently took a job with a rural clinic. Medical records exchange is essentially faxes. There isn’t any credible industry data interchange standard to transfer records and, if there was, it would have been made obsolete by the recent move to icd10.
Best part is we don’t have the staff or time to do anything to those faxes besides import them into the ehr as pdfs. The details seldom if ever make it into the patient record. So instead of practicing medicine, the provider’s are scanning through multi-hundred page pdfs looking for info.
Don’t worry, the Obama Administration will start working on a new systems in 2017.
Bump
Same here! I noticed it the last couple of times I’ve been to see my doctor. The visit feels less personable now.
I go with an elderly relative to her doctors appointments plus I have elderly folks who see a lot of docs. Of all the doctors they see, only one has figured out a system that keeps him freed up to talk to & examine his patients without being totally preoccupied with the laptop/records update/input. This doctor has TWO extra people who help him out ... one before he comes in and one who comes in with him, laptop on wheels & she listens & does all the input. His office is also the most efficient office I’ve ever been in .... he is married to the office manager & she is excellent.
From all I’ve seen/experienced, it’s to the point where I think as destructive as Obamacare has been on so many levels, those who wrote it and voted for this horror should be charged criminally .... fraud & abuse would be good for starters.
Anytime I go to the doctor I always ask him and his receptionist if they like the new obamacare crap. Every single time I am met with a steely look and an answer of “No!”
Close personal friend doc says his productivity has been reduced by at least 30% with the new EMR.
I was in the EMR business in ‘96/’97 as a exec with a subsidiary of Eli Lilly - the whole idea then was to improve doc efficiency.
The whole problem with the development of EMR was one thing: the systems were NOT developed by physicians, but by computer types who have no idea how a doc thinks and works.
Now the systems are killing docs, and the different systems can’t even communicate with each other - a nightmare.
Yes...the patient portals I have refused to join...
Naturally
When you access those portals, your test aren’t there, they push junk like a dietitian’s services. Saw one of those yesterday, she actually told me I was NOT eating enough grains/carbs. Which I know I eat to much of wrong type of carb to keep weight and cholesterol down, as it is a easy digest food where high fiber fruits are not easy to digest.
Pushing that old food pyramid that makes you gain weight.
I prefer the Paleo diet.
Only thing I can give her high marks for is she knew what Gastroparesis was and that digestion is an issue. But the recommendation of eating more smaller meals sucks, doesn’t work, I’ve had this crap 4 yrs so I already know what can and can’t be eaten and how often to eat which is 2 times a day with 1 very small snack, since it takes me 4 hrs to digest what I eat, and if you keep the gut full you cause PAIN. She suggested a sub dairy product that is Soy based. DUH...soy is NOT allowed for Hypothyroid patients.
Her salary is probably decent, since this is a Hematologist Dr, they deal with blood issues, diabetes and cancer. So she probably earns it. Nothing to deal with the crazy blood cells in the bone marrow, which got me sent there. At least it’s not Leukemia, but they sure don’t know what it is yet.
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