Every Presidential succession, a new President seems to make promises to modernize U.S. healthcare, most of them he can’t keep. The Obama Administration’s ambitious agenda to reform a broken healthcare system seems calculated in a similar fashion. But everything is not always as it seems. This time, the new measures offered might achieve results � especially in relation to electronic medical records software implementation.
Healthcare IT (Information Technology) has surfaced as a distinct priority backed up by dollars � lots of dollars; even with some substantial shaving of dollars in the stimulus package ($30 billion was originally allotted for Healthcare IT), the numbers remaining are still a “healthy” $19 billion. Much of the administration’s attention is focused on mechanisms that improve access to data, of which a prominent facet has to be electronic medical records systems and software.
An Obama stated objective is to “invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.” This inevitably leads to finger pointing at a “paper system” where physicians jot down prescriptions in often ineligible handwriting, where patient files and records are misplaced and have to be needlessly duplicated or even created anew from scratch, sacrificing not only paper but efficiency and perhaps safety in the old-fashioned processing. In fact, a wider adoption of medical records should save lives.
EMR systems are quite efficient and proficient in the managing and dispensing of prescription drugs, the primary source of medical errors. But can the Obama-era U.S. healthcare juggernaut take full advantage of a newfound electronic data stream? How much of the data will be quantifiable in a traditional sense? The size of data warehouses will be growing radically. Can the stream be mined adequately in the coming years for qualitative analysis? These questions will pose enormous challenges, but also offer potentially staggering rewards.
