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Wednesday, February 05, 2003Even in Boston, where world-class hospitals spare no expense to treat cancer or deliver babies, and software gurus thrive on solving complex problems, health care was left behind in the drive for efficiency that changed the face of American business in the 1990s. Dr. Harris A. Berman, chief executive of Tufts Health Plan, said the medical sector's failure to harness new systems is wasting a fortune: one-third of every health-care dollar is spent on administration. The piles of paperwork and thickets of mismatched databases make life more difficult for consumers and affect the care they receive. Bankers, car dealers, and tax collectors have all raced past health-care providers in basic technology, he said. That is slowly changing: The shift in thinking has been a long time coming. And it didn't happen purely through market forces. It took federal legislation -- and cost pressures too great to be ignored -- to get the medical arena to embrace the Internet and abandon clunky, decades-old systems. Much of the movement is thanks to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPPA, a law Congress passed in 1996 to help workers keep health coverage when they change jobs. The law also calls for the industry to switch entirely to electronic claims and to create a national standard for the transmission of medical data -- and to protect patient privacy at the same time. The industry is scrambling to meet an April deadline. Ironically, those same HIPAA regulations are spooking doctors away from electronic records in the office. Patient privacy is important to physicians, it always has been, and we do try our best to keep records confidential. But HIPAA has severe penalties for those who fail in this, regardless of how hapless the circumstances may be. That makes people leary of wireless systems, for example. It makes people leary of the potential for easy record theft. And those electronic medical records systems are outrageously expensive, often costing upwards of $30,000 then charging thousands more per year for system support. Then, there’s the concern about what happens to the records if those companies go bankrupt. That happened last year, leaving doctors without access to their own medical records. Electronic medical records would be a blessing in so many ways, but the state of the art and the regulations as they stand now make them a potential nightmare. What we need is a secure, affordable, reliable, user-friendly system. The American Academy of Family Physicians is trying to put together just such a system, but for now, the field needs a lot of work. posted by Sydney on 2/05/2003 08:16:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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