Who Controls Your Medical Records?
Ask a doctor’s office to hand over a complete copy of your medical records and watch them demur, citing state laws and vague hospital policies. Jamie Heywood, featured in October’s issue of Wired magazine, wants such obstacles legislated out of existence. He’s on a quest to make medical records as easy to access as ordering a pizza.
Heywood is behind HealthDataRights.org, a movement to declare individual rights to have and share health data. He believes the reason hospitals guard medicals records so closely is that they don’t want to be second-guessed by patients and lawyers. And that lack of openness, he argues, is making people sicker. By having access to health data in a timely manner, better health decisions will be made and lives will be saved.
While most everyone agrees that getting doctors to convert paper health records to a digital system makes sense, not many doctors and hospitals have made the transition. The national goal is to make electronic medical records available to everyone by 2013.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed early this year, includes $35 billion in incentives for doctors and hospitals to adopt computerized records.
But, only about 10 percent of hospitals and 20 percent of doctors’ offices are fully digitized now, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “We have a very long way to go in a very short time,” she added.
Electronic medical records will transform the practice of medicine, Sebelius said October 6th at the Cerner Health Conference in Kansas City. They will improve the way we provide health care and how we pay for it, both essential components of health care reform.
Physicians could pull up lab data, scans, medical allergies, and other key information on the spot, regardless of whether a patient is visiting a regular physician or on an emergency room operating table.
About one in five patients discharged from the hospital wind up hospitalized again within 30 days, often because they lack adequate follow-up care. Computerization will allow doctors to track their patients’ progress more efficiently, Sebelius said.
Most hospitals have no financial incentive to create electronic records, says Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health. Electronic medical records don’t increase the amount that insurance companies reimburse hospitals for care.
In some ways, inefficient hospitals – which perform duplicate X-rays when the first set can’t be found – can actually make more money, because they charge for each new test, Jha says.
Along with incentives, the Department of Health and Human Services is developing standards for electronic records, so that hospitals and doctors will be able to exchange information. These standards and incentives may finally give hospitals the push they need, experts say.
Did You Know?
The country could eliminate 200,000 drug mistakes and save $1 billion a year if doctors in all hospitals entered their orders on computers, according to a 2005 study in Health Affairs.
Doctors and hospitals that convert to electronic records can receive bonus payments from Medicare and Medicaid beginning in 2011; those not using them by 2015 will face penalties.