October
2007
Microsoft HealthVault: Empowering People to Lead Healthy Lives?
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If you’ve read Mark’s Deconstructing Healthcare in America: A Modest Proposal or one of our other healthcare rants you know Mark’s Daily Apple has a lot to say about America’s ailing and defunct healthcare system. Huge improvements are needed, so we are thrilled to see anything that nominally resembles a step in the right direction.
But let’s not get carried away. Opponents cite online security and privacy as a huge issue to contend with. Also, 80-85% of all doctor’s offices don’t keep any electronic records, so there will need to be some dramatic changes to the status quo. As this article notes, an electronic network that links patron’s records has been used by banks and retailers for over a decade. One has to wonder why the medical establishment hasn’t already implemented similar technology. Especially when considering studies that suggest it could save $500 billion over the next 15 years in medical costs. Your standard compatibility issues, logistical hurdles and steep cost arguments are readily evoked.
Microsoft: There’s no system so messed up that we can’t make it worse
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, HealthVault, Google, WebMD, Revolution Health, medical records, healthcare, Steve Case, Mayo Clinic, Johnson & Johnson, American Heart Association, health care
It is a long, arduous and expensive task, but converting paper health records to electronic health records is very possible and I am a big proponent. Kaiser-Permanente Northern California has recently made the jump to electronic records. In fact, I think that most Kaiser’s across the country are now electronic. As a result, your personal record can be accessed by other Kaiser health care providers even if your personal physician is 1,000 miles away.
We already have the right to have copies of our health record to use as we see fit. However, the original records should always be left in the hands of the trained professionals. Much of a medical record is too complex for the lay-person to fully understand and a small bit of knowledge can be very dangerous when the information gets into the wrong hands.
All in all though, electronic health care systems are happening and it is an excellent way to improve health care. Having said that, health care will continue to be extremely expensive no matter how efficient the delivery system is if chronic conditions continue to escalate in this country. That is, the delivery system(s) as a whole may be sick, but we as a nation are really, really sick.
I think the e-records are a great idea but there will be some major hurdles as you note. The first of these will be a multiple formats. This will either have to be made to work together or combined into one format properly without the loss or misplacement of info the wrong fields where it could be missed and be life or death. The next big issue will be security. I write code for a retailer for a living and can tell you with certainly that encryption is nowhere near foolproof. Providing that criminals (if they had an incentive) didn’t get a hold of the unencrypted data, actually unencrypting it is not really a problem.
Not really sure that there is much of an incentive for criminals who would be able to do that to do it though.
Also, I would think that doctors would need to write more legibly so that less translation mistakes are made.
Joe
No way! Way too Big Brother for me. Can you picture the Presidential candidate whose records were hacked into…and it turns out he was treated for herpes when he was in college?
I’m all for individual offices having electronic records…and giving them (on a disc or flash drive perhaps??) to patients who request them…but way would I want a “Health Vault.” And I don’t even have anything to hide..anything embarrassing in my records…THEY’RE JUST PRIVATE!
So how do the banks do it? And how did they set it up?
It really irks me to hear people start yacking about compatibility issues and security issues without doing some homework (mostly aimed at journalists and people who want to oppose an idea without trying to sound intelligent about it). I called it old dog syndrome when we were building the new computer system at my job. “They don’t want to think about it because they’ll have to learn new tricks.” :p
I’m sure financial information can be hijacked electronically, but it doesn’t seem to happen as often as it could. Something must be going right.
We have the same legal tender and we the same anatomical features. The paperwork can’t be THAT different. And if it, maybe it’s time to let some efficiency people streamline stuff.
I’m all for systems like this. I’ve switched health care providers a few times due to the insurance options offered by new jobs and it’s almost impossible to get health records transferred. A central system would be great and I think Microsoft probably knows more about security than the hospital systems do.
Gal
Mark was suizzing yr site and saw something about your type A-ness.
You might like this..nowt new but elegantly worded nonetheless.
The individual,then,has power,and yet the nature of that power reflects a kind of irreducible existential predicament. If every individual act may ultimately have great consequences,those consequences are almost entirely unforseeable …
Apparently neither Google nor Microsoft has noticed (or perhaps they prefer not to acknowledge) that the technical problem has been comprehensively solved already, by the Veterans Affairs medical system. The remaining problems are not technical but political.
We can talk about ’shoulds’ and ‘translucency’ all we like, in the end the insurance business will find a way to use such a database punitively.
The real question is how to arrive at a health-care system that doesn’t punish the sick. No amount of technology will answer that question.
Also, have you ever tried to extract your own healthcare records from a doctor or hospital ? They don’t let go easily.
The extended version of my grumblings is at
http://dkretzmann.blogspot.com/2007/10/healthcare-nonsense.html