SOME THOUGHTS about electronic health records (EHRs):

Starting the [ObamaCare] campaign, President Obama touted digital medical records to reduce errors, improve care, and cut costs. More than $19 billion of stimulus funds were earmarked for it. But when the Washington Post examined the matter, they discovered that digital records not only fail to produce the promised benefits, they actually reduce efficiency and cause errors. The digital systems currently available give physicians too much information. Pages upon pages of digital information document every conceivable ailment a patient might have. Doctors have difficulty wading through all of the unnecessary data to reach the critical information. One emergency room physician at a hospital that had adopted a digital system complained, "It's been a complete nightmare. I can't see my patients because I'm at a screen entering data . ... Physician productivity and satisfaction have fallen off a cliff."

Uh, huh. A little more bluntly, “ To err is human; to really screw things up requires a computer.” It’s the GIGO rule: garbage in, garbage out. The ‘data mining’ issue has been around for the 20+ years I’ve worked in the intelligence community; it’s never been resolved.

Nor am I the least bit surprised that the cost savings aren’t. Neither is the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). From a summary article in the IEEE Spectrum:

Given that EHRs are being touted by US government officials as a way to significantly improve the quality and reduce health care administrative costs (including saving Medicare), the data don't look so good for achieving either of these objectives.

A quick 5-minute Google search seems to confirm this assertion. I found only one article suggesting a net potential savings roughly $80 billion per year, but a careful reading suggests to me that the savings are largely illusory without substantial patient compulsion.

The savings are chimeras – predicated on controlling behavior.

Then there’s the issue of privacy.

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill, the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” signed into law by President Obama in February, calls for “the utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014.” The law says the records should include a person’s “medical history and problems list.”

The law also says the electronic health record (EHR) will become part of a “nationwide health information technology infrastructure,” accessible with authorization by health-care providers and the government.

But individual Americans can opt to never have an EHR entered in the system, according to Dr. David Blumenthal. “We want to make it clear that no one will ever have to use an electronic health record, if they don’t want to, and that when you do have electronic health records, they’ll have every conceivable privacy protection that is compatible with a useful health care system.”

Er, sorry Charlie, but that last little italicized phrase guarantees that I most certainly will opt out unless there is an iron-clad lock on my medical records for which I have the only key, complete authority to decide who – and under what conditions – will be granted access, and the ability to revoke access for any reason sufficient only to me.

And there are reasons for being obstinate on that point:

[A] story in the American Medical News in late November about the Cleveland Clinic giving $1 million to a start-up company called Explorys to "commercializ[e] the patient database search system Cleveland Clinic developed." The Cleveland Clinic has a very extensive EHR system and data base of patient information that it now wishes to exploit.

[A] report by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP that found 76% of healthcare executives surveyed felt that all the data being collected in their EHR systems was going to be their organization's greatest asset over the next five years. It also found that the executives only felt they could recoup their investments if they could exploit that information in some way.

Bluntly put, electronic health records are about control - not care.