The Evidence Gap - Health Care That Puts a Computer on the Team - Series - NYTimes.com

The Evidence Gap - Health Care That Puts a Computer on the Team - Series - NYTimes.com:

For too long the essential need for electronic medical records has been debated ad nauseum with paranoid concerns about privacy and confidentiality. These attributes must and can be managed well, but no system is perfect as long as humans build, maintain and use it.

The benefits far outweigh the costs and I hope Obama can trigger the huge change needed in both technology and public attitudes. A $50 billion commitment is just what the doctor ordered to move us out of the dark ages.

My new physician has agreed to use email with me when appropriate. Perhaps the day is not far away when electronic records will dominate and my dog-eared brown folder will disappear into the bowels of a shredder.

"...The Bush administration has left it mainly to advocacy and the private sector to introduce digital medicine. But President-elect Barack Obama apparently plans to make a sizable government commitment. During the campaign, Mr. Obama vowed to spend $50 billion over five years to spur the adoption of electronic health records and said recently that a program to accelerate their use would be part of his stimulus package..."

"...For most doctors, who work in small practices, an investment in electronic health records looks simply like a cost for which they will not be reimbursed. That is why policy experts say any government financial incentives to use electronic records — matching grants or other subsidies — should be focused on practices with 10 or fewer doctors, which still account for three-fourths of all doctors in this country. Only about 17 percent of the nation’s physicians are using computerized patient records, according to a government-sponsored survey published in The New England Journal of Medicine...."

This conclusion is the key to success:

"...The quality of care goes up dramatically just by having information instantly,” Dr. DeVries said. Yet, as her colleague and veteran of computer medicine Dr. Melski notes, there is no payoff to technology alone — only in people using technology wisely.

“We have to restructure our medical culture,” he said. “We have to promote a culture that believes in the evidence and is trained in analyzing the evidence. It’s the only long-run answer to the challenges we face in health care — evidence-based medicine.”