“Here’s something I’d like explained, now that I’ve read amazing findings in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine about the pathetic pace at which health information technology, or health IT, is being adopted by hospitals, following a similar NEJM report last summer about foot-dragging physicians: Why are the benefits of health IT and electronic health records, and the fixability of their flaws, apparently taken for granted? More specifically, is it truly worth $30 billion, as the Obama administration proposes, to digitize everybody’s individual medical histories, test results, medications, scans, clinical notes from physicians and nurses, and other healthcare detritus and convert them into electronic health records, accessible from anywhere? To enter prescriptions into hospital computers in order to slash the awful toll of patients injured or dead because of the wrong medication, the wrong dose, or a deadly drug interaction?”
Article
Jake Linkowski, Cataract Outsourcing, 27 March 2009
