The momentum is gathering for electronic health care records. Such a massive undertaking raises all the questions in this article. But there is one more essential question that will affect both the costs and benefits of this digitization:
Will individual records be digitized going forward only, or will each individual's history of health care also be digitized?
The article fails to address this critical point.
"The bottom line is that better health care may not happen in the U.S. without better health-care information technology. Sooner or later all of us will probably be carrying around our medical history in a key-ring device or an ATM-type card or maybe even a surgically implanted chip. The benefits could be extraordinary. IBM sees opportunities to apply massive computing power to help doctors make diagnoses and treatment decisions. New standard practices could be communicated to doctors within months rather than 15 years, the current lag between discovery and practice. Pharmaceutical companies with access to anonymous health data could improve and speed up drug development. There may even be a buck or two in it for consumers from what has been called information liquidity: If you want access to my data, pay me. Best of all, we could finally throw away those damned clipboards."
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