Joe's Blog

I found an interesting article about the future of health care records. Here's a linkhttp://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/135131.php

The article is titled “US Will Have Digital Health Records In 5 Years Says Obama”. The article went on to discuss the plans that president Obama stated in a speech, Thursday January the eighth, where as part of his stimulus plan he wants to “reduce cost and improve the quality of health care” by rolling out a project that will digitize and computerize all health records in America. This project is estimated to cost 75 to 100 billion (yes billion with a B) dollars. The plan is supposed to streamline medical records and make them universal. This will be a major undertaken and according to the article not everyone is in agreement with how this should be done if it can be accomplished at all.

This will take an enormous effort including tremendous IT support especially knowing that only 8 percent of hospitals and 17 percent of doctor’s offices are currently using this kind of medical record system. The article went on to mention that there will need to be an influx of IT personnel to pull of a project of this magnitude.

One other very important point of the article was that there will most likely be fierce competition for the rights to provide the software needed for such an undertaken as the monetary stakes and rewards will be so high. Microsoft and Google currently have or are working on software solutions to nationalize medical records. Stay tuned as this story is just in its infancy.