Electronic medical records for all!!!
I realize healthcare isn’t my area of expertise, but it’s a hot topic these days and as a a computer scientist I feel obliged to sing the praises of electronic medical records (EMRs).
Today Ezra Klein highlighted this recent study, which questions whether EMRs really improve patient care. The study looks at whether patients seeing private doctors received improved care when EMRs were available (the study used NAMCS data). In most cases, the answer was no, but I think the study misses the best part of what EMRs have to offer.
If EMRs become widespread, they open the door to a huge new area of medical research. Computer-aided diagnosis is going to get a lot better if millions of anonymized medical records become available. A few years ago I went to a talk by MIT professor Peter Szolovits. He was able to use a computer to diagnose certain heart conditions from audio recordings better than most doctors. EMRs would greatly facilitate the development of automated screening procedures. More importantly, when new procedures are developed, they could be applied retroactively to data collected years earlier, even when a patient stops seeing a doctor. There’s absolutely no way to do this now.
EMRs would also be a huge boon to public health research. Researchers could be given access to a huge data base of anonymous medical records, all in a standard format. It would be trivial to check if two conditions are correlated, or if one disease occurs more often in some segment of the population. The amount of data would be so large, a doctor could even search for records similar to their patent, and use those records as a guide for what health problems to watch for.
Finally EMRs make much better use of healthcare we already provide. If you go in for surgery, all sorts of equipment is used to monitor your well-being. This data should be recorded and reviewed by a doctor who isn’t busy cutting you open. If you go in for a 3D bodyscan, even more data is collected. The scan could easily be reviewed by experts in other parts of the country, provided they have access to your EMR.
EMRs allow for a much more reliable and efficient healthcare system. Also they save a bunch of money, which is good too.
July 19th, 2007 at 4:01 am
I agree! EMRs are a great idea - but there are a bunch of different companies working on it, so there are still going to be major compatibility issues. Since we don’t have a national system for ANYTHING health related, if you go to a different hospital/doctor, they probably wont’ be able to get your previous records electronically. Hopefully this glitch will sort itself out and we will all be medical-error free. yay!