Start investing in Electronic Healthcare
Our paper based healthcare system is archaic and inefficient. The US currently lags behind our neighbors in electronic based healthcare.
Electronic health records are the key to empowering the patient, ensuring safety, security and privacy, and saving taxpayers billions in costs.
We need to invest in companies that are making Electronic Health Records possible, foster data sharing and securing initiatives and give incentives to healthcare providers to move away from their paper systems and onto electronic ones.
sammyj
shared this idea
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epheterson
commented
I say digitize all medical records and let google do the dirty work or organizing them. Google is great at it! I'd like to be able to see my own records online, instantly, at any time; they are -my- records. I'd also like anonymous data to be available to the world at large. The entire database shall be available to the government so that it has an up-to-the-minute census of the health of America.
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wshayes
commented
My position is that healthcare information should be owned by the public just like epidemic data is a public health concern. If we treat abuse of healthcare information just like misuse of cars, that is the more appropriate way of managing it rather than trying to protect the data. Of course, I'm not saying make everything public, but setting an anonymous ID for the data works.
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sammyj
commented
@RichN: I agree with the security concern, however, a lot of sensitive data is on the web (credit cards, banks, etc.). It's much easier to track who's seen a digital copy than a paper copy
There are a lot of public/private companies with great products, but they're still expensive, we need to make them affordable for the average healthcare provider.
Thanks for the votes!
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RichN
commented
This idea was pushed by both campaigns, especially as a way of reducing costs. However, I'm very concerned about the security of this data. I fear that it will inevitably be "hacked", or that the very personal data will be used improperly.
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epheterson
commented
Done. This is one of Obama's ideas posted under the Health section of his site. It's on the way :)
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seattlepete
commented
Yes, there are private companies which can provide comprehensive EMRs. Having the government negotiate for lowering the cost to providers is one way to go, but why not consider the FOSS solution that is already in place at the VA? Get a CTO who will champion VistA and we'll be that much closer to an inexpensive, standard EMR in the US.
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psid22
commented
The are many organizations out there that currently provide solutions for this (i.e. EPIC) however I think the key to making this affordable to Healthcare companies ultimately benefit patients is that there should be standards around the e-Health record forcing it to be standard and portable between providers, pharmacy, insurer, etc.