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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (6215)	3/2/2009 6:35:11 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Take the best of breed and modify it to operate on several levels. This is not quantum mechanics. A lot of people who don't know anything about quantum mechanics think about quantum mechanics and say, "This isn't rocket science". This is a far more complex problem than you realize. Security is an exceptionally difficult problem. For example, there are very stringent legal requirements on the disclosure of whether a person has HIV. You can't just stick a lab report in a national database and hope only the right people can see it. While it may be totally fine for a particular provider to access this information, it would be a blatant violation of the law for certain members of his office staff to see it. And in fact, it might be a blatant violation of the law for other providers on his staff to see it if they weren't involved in the case in some way. Consider this access in the context of Mental Health data, which can be even more difficult to safeguard. How do you systematically provide access to mental health information to those who are permitted to have access and prevent those who aren't allowed from getting such access. You absolutely cannot have the kinds of breaches as we saw when "Joe the Plumber" was investigated by a rogue government employee. Security is one huge aspect but there are others. You have to deal with the fact that different offices work in radically different ways. In very few would physicians ever have hands-on a computer. This number is increasing, but would not reach 75% for years. You have to address a variety of kinds of lab data dumping into a system with varying formats and contexts. Are you going to force a generic billing system on providers as well as the EHR? That would require going back to square one since the standard interface has assumed that would not be the case. No offense, but I just think you don't comprehend the scope of the problem. I'm a CPA who spent years learning and using the Internal Revenue Code. It is an order of magnitude simpler than the problem we're discussing.