That Happened!

New York - It has been proposed by President Elect Obama to make all medical records electronic. This comes about in a massive effort to reform our health care system. If records are electronic then the cost of health care will decline and health care will get a big lift from where it currently stands. The time line for this change is five years.

However, this is not going to be as easy as it may sound as there are going to be many hurdles to jump over to get there. Currently only 8 percent of hospitals nation wide use this type of electronic system for keeping medical records along with only 17 percent of doctors. Along with implementing this new system of keeping the records, there would have to be a work force put together to accomplish this as right now there is no where near enough. Also, experts are very concerned with the matter of patient privacy.

This type of change may also be extremely expensive, costing anywhere from $75 to $100 billion over a ten year period. That is pricey since it would be the most expensive part of the stimulus plan that the President Elect has suggested and is trying to get passed, consisting of $800 billion.

The most expensive part of this program would be hiring and training those who could come up with a system that would be easy for doctors to learn and use anytime and anywhere they needed to access the information. Doctors do not have the time to learn a complicated software program, so the creators of the technology would have to come up with something that can think like a doctor.

It has been shown that if this program is implemented it would create about 212,000 jobs to get it up and running along with being maintained. However, there are not enough qualified medical IT professionals to fill those positions, so IT’s would have to not only be hired to come up with the technology but trained in the medical field first.

For each hospital to implement this type of program it is being estimated it will cost around $2 million each, a total of $340 million. However, it is being said that this type of program, although pricey to put into place, may actually save the health care industry $200 to $300 billion per year.

Privacy matters for the patient’s records are a huge concern also as the possibility of hackers is always there. There are also programs like Google Health that are not required to follow HIPAA regulations. HIPAA was not designed for web based use or integration so it would be yet another hurdle to jump over in order to institute this new type of record keeping.

The Bush administration has already begun laying the foundation for this program and pilot programs have been put into place in a few states. Massachusetts plans on having fully computerized records by the year 2012 at 14,000 physicians offices. They also plan on having 63 of their state’s hospitals using this program by 2014.