Patient veto for e-care records
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Ministers are expected to signal the go-ahead for the controversial electronic medical records system.
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What do you think of the Medicare drug discount-card program? (Check all that apply.). I&#39;m eligible but I don&#39;t use it. Biopsy results confirm a young Dublin man has contracted the human form of mad cow disease.
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Questions, questions, questions The third annual Care Record Development Board get-together got underway yesterday (Thursday), bringing together "key stakeholders" in the government's proposed digitising of the UK's medical records.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Doctors would get $3 for every patient signed up to use an electronic health record under terms of a bill introduced Thursday by U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat. The Personalized Health Information Act would require that the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services create a personal health record incentive program to help speed U.S. adoption of e-health records. E-health records can cut health-care costs by consolidating patient information and eliminating medical errors, such as prescription interactions, proponents say. U.S. President George Bush has called on the U.S. government and private health-care providers to work together to provide e-health records to all residents by 2014. Using e-health records would allow patients to avoid filling out forms found in nearly every doctor's office, Kennedy said. The records would allow health-care providers to send messages to patients, such as reminders that a child is due for a vaccine. Some e-health records allow patients to send e-mail to their doctors, schedule appointments online, or view test results. But e-health records have been slow to catch on, partly because doctors haven't embraced them. Kennedy's bill would give U.S. doctors $3 for each patient converted to an e-health record over three years. A spokeswoman for Kennedy didn't immediately have an estimate of how much the program would cost. E-health records "are a critical piece of the puzzle as we move forward in an effort to improve the quality and cost efficiency of the health-care system in this country," Kennedy said. The bill would empower patients to be better informed and would also improve communication between them and their health-care providers, he said. Several companies and organizations, including Microsoft, e-health record vendor Allscripts, and the American Heart Association, endorsed the bill. Patients' ability to access personal health records "is a critical starting point to improved health care," Peter Neupert, Microsoft's corporate vice president for health strategy, said in a statement.
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Blog: Stanford and Harvard researchers find that electronic records aren't helping to improve outpatient medical care.
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(InfoWorld) - Computerization of health care record keeping remains both a need and a challenge, said IT and health care dignitaries at an IBM-sponsored conference in San Jose, Calif. on Monday. IBM's New Paradigms for Using Computers 2007 workshop focused on health care interfaces. Previous years' workshops have covered such topics as Web 2.0 and mobile computing. "Health care is moving in the direction of computerization, but there's so many difficult issues in the user interface in particular that have not been addressed," said John Barton, manager of Interaction Science at IBM. Right now, health care is plagued by bad interfaces, said Paul Tang, vice president and chief medical officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif. "It's really driving under the influence of terrible interfaces," he said. Tang cited studies that estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year in the United States resulting from medical mismanagement in hospitals. Patient safety would be enhanced by having better information available, he stressed. Information is fragmented. "There's almost no way a single individual could put this stuff together," but health depends on it, he said. Rather than just throwing computers at what are now paper processes, ethnography would help in figuring out what information is needed, said Tang.Â  At Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a Web site, PAMFOnline, provides patients and health care persons access to the same records. Patients can enter information and access data like test results. But patients can only add to personal, not official, health records, Tang said. About 45 percent of the foundation's patients are signed up. Should they choose, patients can pay $60 year to send messages to their doctors via the site, said Tang. He said he did not expect to ever see a centralized national health record database because of public concerns over privacy and security. "To put all information into one database just puts too much at risk," Tang said when interviewed after his presentation. Introduction of electronic health records is a nice way to make doctors and nurses more efficient, but it takes more time to use a computer than paper, said speaker Jakob Bardram, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen who has been involved in health care. Paper records will not go away, he said. It is easier, however, to retrieve information on computers than on paper, Bardram said. Hospital persons need to be able to move about the building and enter information on different systems rather than being consigned to a single terminal for data entry, he said. PDAs, for their part, are not much of a solution because they do not have batteries that will have last a full seven-hour shift, said Bardram. "I think [PDAs] have a hard time in hospitals," Bardram said. But PDAs are being used in hospitals, he said. He urged development of middleware or operating systems that support mobility in hospitals and extend to health care workers' homes. Through a concept dubbed "Activity Roaming," health care workers could move between different computers and systems. A middleware platform has been developed for this, but it has not been deployed yet, said Bardram. IBM efforts in health care have included work on standards such as HL7 (Health Level 7) as well as participation in the Nationwide Health Information Network. The company is seeking to connect islands of information, such as patients, clinics, and hospitals. Also the event, Barbara Bennett, a health care business and transactional lawyer, said the IT industry has no clue what it means to delve into health care because health care is heavily regulated and IT has had little of this "It's overwhelming" to people used to a business has been essentially unregulated, Bennett said. She listed key legal risks to watch for in developing products for health care: * Privacy and security, including overlapping federal and state laws. * FDA regulations that govern how medical devices, including software, can packaged, labeled, marketed, and sold. * Medicare reimbursement, in which products must be reimbursable if they are to be sold. * Fraud and abuse, in which influencing patient or physician choices can be seen as an attempt to steer health care product referrals. This factor can affect a product design and sales strategy. * Malpractice. Technology can be seen by users as potentially causing mistakes rather than preventing them.
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The introduction of electronic patient records as part of a Â£6.8bn NHS IT upgrade comes under attack from MPs.
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Should an AIDS patient&#39;s unit and his closely-related ones be informed of his disease if he is confirmed? How do we protect patient&#39;s right of privacy?
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Floating ideas at the CRDB Work has begun on a social care equivalent of the care records guarantee for medical records, paving the way for merging health and social care records. The plans were disclosed as part of a debate at the annual Care Records Development Board meeting in London, yesterday.â¦
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California Gov. Arnold  Schwarzenegger on Wednesday vetoed three bills aimed at   boosting e-mail privacy at work as well as safeguard private  medical and financial data.
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Doctors in Massachusetts would be able to access patients' records from any hospital or clinic in the state by computer under an initiative announced Monday.
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Choose and Book unfit for purpose The British Medical Association said today the NHS's Choose and Book system is unfit for purpose and actually limits choice for patients.â¦
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The U.S. defense and veterans affairs agencies have started sharing some medical data with each other. But they still can't fully exchange the electronic health records of patients, despite nine years of IT work.
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Just like with do-it-yourself taxes, a growing software industry lets patients create their own "personal health records." No more answering 10-page questionnaires every time you visit a new doctor Â just hit the print button before leaving home to arrive armed with your life's medical history.
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Until a review has taken place An open letter to government from the doctors' association calls for a halt to the roll out of summary care records until a review has taken place.â¦
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By Jeffrey Kelley, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.  Jun. 18--Virginia Commonwealth University Health System is installing a network that allows doctors to exchange electronic medical records wirelessly and patients to send e-mail and use the Internet from bed.
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.