The Savvy Tech Strategy Behind Obamacare 146
snydeq writes "The U.S. health care industry is undergoing several massive transformations, not the least of which is the shift to interoperable EHR (electronic health records) systems. The ONC's Doug Fridsma discusses the various issues that many health care IT and medical providers have raised regarding use of these systems, which are mandated for 2014 under the HITECH Act of 2004, and are all the more important in light of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Key to the transition, says Fridsma, is transforming health IT for EHRs into something more akin to the Internet, and less like traditional ERP and IT systems. 'I think what we're trying to do is the equivalent of what you've got in the Internet, which is horizontal integration rather than vertical integration,' Fridsma says. 'We've done a lot of work looking at what other countries have done, and we've tried to learn from those experiences. Rather than trying to build this top down and create restrictions, we're really trying to ask, "What's the path of least regret in what we need to do?"'"
Re:Too bad someone didn't figure this all out (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually makes things worse. Because when the EHR's are in place they usually make sure to maximize the billable services provided in the back office so that you make sure to submit every claim possible. This helps to raise healthcare costs instead of lowering them by reducing paperwork......
Re:Too bad someone didn't figure this all out (Score:5, Interesting)
I moved out of the US, now any doctor I go to in the country, can look me up by name and DOB and see my entire medical history (or health care number, which nobody ever has on them).
The problem the US commits every time is that they ask the people who profit from the systems, how to make them. Every solution I've seen could have been done better by a bunch of high school students. The pros have a vested interest in making it fail. The worse it works, the longer they have jobs. And never are there financial penalties in government contracts.
Re:Learning from what other countries have done? (Score:3, Interesting)
That does not maximize insurance industry profit. Which is in fact the entire point of the ACA.
Nope. The entire point of the ACA is to destroy the insurance industry, causing an emergency for which the only solution will be single-payer.
They told the insurance industry "sure we're bending you over a barrel here, but at least you are going to get a lot more people buying policies." The insurance industry never wanted this, but tried to get the best deal they could to try to weather the storm.
But insurance companies are screwed. If you don't buy insurance, you pay a penalty, which goes to the US federal government and not the insurance companies. The penalty is cheaper than insurance, and because of "no preexisting conditions" the insurance companies have to accept you even if you took the penalty for years. So, when you are young and healthy, you pay the penalty; then when you get cancer, or get hit by a car, or incur any other major health problem, you immediately sign up for insurance, they have to take you. So the insurance company gets one month of premiums and then pays big for care. The ACA makes it so that the rational thing to do is only to sign up for insurance when you know you have bills that will cost more than the insurance payment.
Also, the ACA defines what kind of insurance you must buy: did you want high deductible with low premiums? Sorry, you can't have that, the ACA doesn't allow high deductibles. So premiums are guaranteed to be high, thus encouraging people to just pay the penalty.
Is this by design, or is the ACA incompetently written? I'm pretty sure it's the former.
I remember seeing a YouTube video of a Democrat in Washington D.C. talking to a group. "People say the Affordable Care Act has a 'Trojan Horse' hidden inside it that will lead to single payer. What's hidden about it? It's right there!" The audience laughed and cheered.
I couldn't find that one but I did find this. At about 4:40 a Democrat says "some guy from the insurance industry said the public option would put insurance companies out of business. He was right!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=926bPZiQhgY [youtube.com]
Re:Too bad someone didn't figure this all out (Score:4, Interesting)
This. This. This.
My wife and I had our second child two weeks ago. Despite the fact that we had spent nine months working closely with a clinic that had been monitoring the pregnancy, dispensing the proper medications, and who had midwives and doctors working at the hospital we would be delivering at, when we arrived at the hospital we found that they had NOTHING in their systems regarding my wife and her medical history. We then spent an hour telling the triage nurse everything we knew about the pregnancy from memory, until a doctor from our clinic finally showed up at the hospital with a big folder of printouts that no one had time to look at because my wife delivered a half hour later.
When we asked afterwards why the hospital had no record of us despite the fact that they knew we would be delivering there, they explained their system had no way to transfer electronic records and that they were still relying on printouts that would have to be entered by hand. Amusingly enough, they were launching a new networked electronic system while we were there that would enable the transfer of records.
Of course, the hospital staff freely admitted the new system was a complete headache to learn and that they had resisted it as long as possible, but thanks to "Obamacare" they were now required by law to implement such a system. Let that sink in for a moment. Hospitals are perfectly happy to have absolutely no information on the patients that arrive in their emergency rooms in America because upgrading their information systems is a hassle.
People complain about government regulations, but in this case, I'm perfectly happy to have government give the Medical industry a swift regulatory kick in the ass on this. There is no excuse for endangering human lives like this.