Disagreement on Benefits of Computerized Health Records

Robert Pear, writing in the 6/7/2010 New York Times ("Doctors and Hospitals Say Goals on Computerized Records Are Unrealistic") quotes several sources to support his thesis that the Federal Government has promulgated inappropriate expectations and time-lines for implementation of billions of dollars ($34 billion) in subsidies for the purchase of health care computer systems by doctors and hospitals.

Although medical literature is divided on whether computerization benefits medical care outcome quality, it seems that medical and hospital administrators, who have no direct patient care ongoing experience and may be interested in the financial benefits of the subsidy, tend to praise the concept of computerization, though not the Obama administration's expectation and timelines.  For my part, I have never seen a computer that can quickly and inexpensively find a breast or testicular lump, or detect a swollen lymph node in the neck, or read a drug-seeking patient's body language. On the other hand, physicians who spend their time entering data into computer keypads probably won't have the time or incentive to carefully check for those breast, testicular and lymph node lumps and will probably find their patient flow statistics enhanced by giving the narcotic-seeking patients the drugs they want rather than deal with the complexities of care that these patient require.

The real benefits of the subsidy may be China, whose industries churn out huge numbers of (?virus infected?) computers which will be bought by American health care providers and brought into doctors' offices and health care facilities where they will store highly sensitive personal data. As someone whose personal medical data was stolen from a health care facility, I wonder if we really know what we are getting into?

Does China Benefit From America's Health Care Reform?

Aside from the dubious benefit of turning $300+ per hour physicians into minimum-wage data input clerks, as they waste their time in entering computer data into terminals rather than spend their time actually talking to, examining and thinking about patients, there are other problems with the push to computerizing health care records.

Most of the computer equipment that I see these days has Chinese origin.I don 't fault Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs from developing their computer system production capacity and quality, but I do believe that a big chunk of the   "computerized medical records" budget will not lower America's  health care costs, will not create jobs in the health care industry and will not improve health care. But it will result in a huge American demand for Chinese-origin computer systems which will funnel money right out of American health care and into China's coffers, aggravating our economic recovery, unemployment and America's trade deficit with China. Not only will the push to computerize America's health records weaken our dollar, but as the New York Times points out today, "Little Benefit Seen, So Far, in Electronic Patient Records".

Will Your Health Information Be Secure?

Today, President-Elect Obama announced his goal of having all medical records computerized in five years.

Approximately 10 days ago, a team (Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens,
Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, Benne de Weger) "...identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol." http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

Because access is not assured secure, computer medical records, which hold your and my highly personal and sensitive information, are not secure. A team has documented its ability to break a major security system used by financial agencies. Hackers will be attracted to the new challenge of computerized medical records like maggots to old meat.