In this era of layoffs, hard choices and double-digit unemployment, it occurs to me that the diaspora of people with software knowledge in America could get started now on a path toward a uniform standard for digitizing health records.
That would remove one of the major obstacles toward streamlining healthcare as a whole, which would then help to make healthcare affordable and accessible for the millions of Americans who are without it, and therefore are, at a minimum, riding the edge of catastrophe.
It might even put people to work. Imagine that!
My (scant) research on this topic has turned up an article in the LA Times, which itself raises the concern I just mentioned, as well as another major acceptance curve among doctors and healthcare facilities with regard to liability for holding and seeing data that is private.
Money magazine is even more pessimistic, saying that we don't have enough talent here in the USA to get it done: "Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology."
I don't believe that. Not for a second. What, you don't think you can train me to internalize the workings of a complex data set?
Look, we landed two dudes on the moon in ten years. This isn't so complex that we can't get it done in five.
To buttress my argument, I point to a sentence in the same Money magazine article just before that doomsaying that says this: "Only about 8% of the nation's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation."
You don't have to be a computer geek, then, to extrapolate the following: We've already got this, at least 3 or 4 different ways. Buy one/pick one, tweak it, and declare it the standard. Government can do that, and then devote the stimulus resources allocated to the problem to conquer the acceptance and privatization issues - boom! We're done! We've then created a knowledge base, an industry, and a standard everybody could learn and work from. And ongoing jobs getting new docs and pharmacists (dentists? psychologists? chiropractors?) ramped up and ready to participate.
There are still problems: the country is rightly fighting over privatization standards. Big Pharma is trying to turn your data into a sellable commodity. But can't we get a jump on the standard? Can't we break off the piece of this that we DO agree on, and get people on it and back to work?
I'm ready. You are, too. This is too important to hold up. Call your Senator. Write your Congressman.
Yes, We Can. Let's get to work!
Update: I thought I'd put a poll in here. I tried to grade the various states of 'readiness' for digitizing medical records.