Haha, no under Obummer, they started things like Blue Button and requiring EHR/EMR, etc. However there is no universal backbone, or registry where your medical records are being shipped off to DC every time they are touched.
Hell, Most health care delivery chains in the US can’t even get their internal systems to speak to each other effectively.. let alone come to a universal standard for FHIR . The main backbone of most is still HL7 which was created in 1989. FHIR was designed to replace it, but being open ended, standardizing what fields mean what for all the custom fields each provider used is a minefield.
Now, I will grant you that Medicare gives them tons of information since they are the payor for these things, they get coded information to justify they billing, but they aren’t rummaging through your individual medical records.
Even today, trying to get your records from one system to another system that is unrelated is a crap shoot, depending on the vendors each of your providers are using.
CA has a single system nationwide, go anywhere and they will have your records available... walk into a hospital ER in the US that isn’t part of your network and its a crapshoot at best as to what they will be able to get for you, if anything.
EHR/EMR are a mess, they are various private businesses, whose entire business model is to keep extracting the data from them as difficult as possible, so you can’t change systems easily...
One of the most corrupt decisions of the last decade was the VA/Military “decision” to move from Vista, a fully publicly funded (and highest rated EMR out there) to a Commercial product called Cerner.. This was supposed to have already happened, but they can’t get the data from VISTA into CERNER and get it all up and running smoothly so they keep delaying its deployment (https://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=5833)
This was a total scam, and a whole lot of people got their pockets padded for this corrupt decision.
Please, I know your paranoid friends are telling you otherwise, and nebulous web sites are advancing conspiracy theories, but believe me, they can’t even get the data out of their own systems into new systems, but you think the plethora of private EHR’s out there in all sorts of situations that are intentionally designed to keep their customers captive by making the data difficult to get out, are all sharing it with some big WHOPPER system sitting in some basement in DC is just laughably wrong.
Google and Amazon both thought they were going to jump into the Medical Area a decade or so ago, and after years of fumbling realized they can’t fix it either, its too complicated and complex for them, and both last I checked had either completely cancelled their plans, or had cut funding back to the point that if they are still alive they are basically nothing more than for PR purposes.
From what I’ve seen and experienced personally, I fully agree with you HamiltonJay.
One Big CF.
I know that it seems every time we go to the doctors we have to fill out new forms because they changed their “systems”. Nine times out of ten they take months to iron out the bugs so your info is correct. Just when they get it all figured out, they change their “third party” processors and we go through all that crap again. If our government can follow all that...more power to them!
Good post—reflects what I have seen as well.
That said—it is sad that all that protects our privacy is .gov and Big Tech incompetence.
It is enough to make me want to have white people banned from all health care record keeping and data processing positions—we need to keep those employees as dumb as possible!