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Increasing Medical Efficiency – Eliminating Pencils at Hospitals

If you have ever switched from one doctor to another or moved to an entirely new state and had your medical history transferred, you should understand the inefficient system regarding medical records. With technology at a point where I can enter in a street address in any city in the United States and find a satellite image of it, there needs to be a point where technology catches up to the healthcare industry to digitize all medical record information.

The problem at the moment is switching from paper medical records to electronic medical records – this would take time for employees, doctors and staff, to become acclimated to the new system and would represent a short-term cost of purchasing the new equipment and the brief opportunity cost of taking the time to learn the new system. The flip-side of this, however, is the potential reduction of errors and the creation of jobs to teach the new healthcare operating systems. The RAND Corporation, a non-profit research organization, forecasts savings of transitioning from paper to digital records from anywhere from $77 to $81 billion annually if the healthcare industry would adopt a new computerized system.

Moving medical records from paper form to electronic form will reduce potential manual errors. A subsequent reaction from this is an increase in time spent with patients on the behalf of doctors and staff – wouldn't spending more time with the doctor, as opposed to a brief 15 minute tryst, greatly increase the quality of healthcare provided? There is always a cause and effect – reduce time spent away from patients results in more time spent with the patient. More time with a patient results in a greater quality of health care and, in turn, would create healthier patients in the future – also reducing the potential costs later in life.

The cost of transitioning from paper medical records to electronic medical records could be, initially, a bit on the high end for doctors and staff, especially with smaller hospitals and practices in smaller towns. A way to mitigate this concern is to have the federal government provide financial incentives to make the transition more smooth – a subsidy, a relatively low payment schedule, perhaps? Maybe even local and state entities could issue general obligation bonds, which potentially provide triple tax exemption, to aid in financing the transition.

http://www.rand.org/news/press.05/09.14.html