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

To: Lane3 who wrote (6232)	3/3/2009 3:32:19 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

<<<there are costs and benefits to everything. None of us is in a position to weigh them against each other. We just don't know enough. But you are just looking at the benefits and ignoring the costs. The benefits may not outweigh the costs.>>> There have been numerous studies on the cost benefits of automating medical records. The question is really about designing and implementing a system that can maximize the advantages of all the new technologies. I don't think there are credible people who can make a convincing argument not to move forward. <<<An example.>>> There are a lot of examples of systems gone wrong, bad systems, and systems that didn't pan out. It is important that we learn from past mistakes. <<<How many times would anyone look back through doctors' notes, even if they could read them? ... If you had the doctor input text rather than codes, it wouldn't be as costly as coding, but then you wouldn't be able to aggregate your results>>> That is one of the problems. Most doctors trained before computers became widely available. If you notice now many doctors even in their 40's and 50's are starting to use the computer in their examination room. At the end of visit the presciptions are printed from the computer. They are also starting to do this in major hospitals. Doctors and nurses enter their notes directly into the computer. These notes become available to all doctors and nurses that make the rounds on the different shifts. There is no choice. This is the direction of the future. Old ways and old practises have to go. You are not going to be able to fight progress. The only question is how efficiently and how quickly we proceed to the future. With the progress being made in wireless handheld devices and speech recognition programs we will not be able to recognise how medicine will be practised 20 years from now. Remember the personal computer industry didn't realy start before 1994. Bill Gates didn't go on the Internet until people in his company forced him to go on in 1994. How important is it to try to locate and retrieve notes that doctors have written on paper and misfiled? Life and death sometimes. <<<Having read your comments on this topic it is clear that you don't have a clue about the enormity, complexity, and difficulty of building systems. Programming is the least of it.>>> People with ancient knowledge may be worse off. You were probably one of those ancient programmers that designed systems that were air cooled and required specialists to operate and maintain. They probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if not tens of million dollars to operate. Today's Ipod probably hold more than the rooms full of storage devices you worked on. Times are achanging. You have to move on.