- FDA Rules for Cigarettes Are a Victory for Public Health, for Science (and for the Earth’s Climate?)
- Legislation Introduced to Codify Stem Cell Rules
- Commissioner Enhances FDA’s Commitment to Personalized Medicine
- Perfecting Policy on Stem Cells
- NIH and FDA Aim to Retool Regulatory Science
- DOE Leads Federal Funding for a Regional Innovation Cluster
- Certainty on the Science of Climate Change
- They’re Not Perfect Cells, But They’re Model Cells
- Genomic Medicine on the March
- President’s Budget Aims to Recharge Regional Innovation
- Event: The Science of Climate Change
- Progress in Bioethics
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Health IT: Private and Public Push Needed
A telling quote in today’s Washington Post article about Microsoft Corp.’s new online electronic-medical-record service, HealthVault, encapsulates why the federal government needs to join the private sector’s push for personal and secure online Electronic Medical Records. EMRs “would be ‘great for patients, but there’s absolutely no business case for doing it in primary care,’ said Richard J. Baron, an internist in Philadelphia whose practice uses an electronic record system similar to HealthVault.” Microsoft beat its competitors, including Google, to the punch, as a number of information technology companies and health insurers are trying, with mixed success, to lure doctors away from their paper- and office-based health recordkeeping and into the IT age. That’s why a concerted push by the federal government is necessary to establish health IT interoperability standards and privacy protections for personal electronic medical records, provide health IT funding for safety-net providers, and make new investments in data capacity and comparative effectiveness research.
Comments on this article
That’s why we need a federal law requiring electronic medical recordkeeping as a condition of payment for Medicare, Medicaid and other federally-financed health care programs. This is easily done, and wouldn’t cost much. I do some back of the envelope math on my website this morning at GoozNews.com.
Congrats on the new site.
October 5th, 2007 at 3:14 pm