The Obama administration wants to digitize and standardize medical data. You know, have everybody collaborate and agree on a standard, common data format, and be able to exchange records between different providers, securely, in an agreed-upon data format.
To which the entire computer industry should have one loud and universal response: Duh.
In any part of any business, when you have to exchange information from one entity to another, the largest cost is converting/translating/munging from one data format to another. Anybody who has ever worked on a non-trivial integration project can tell you that.
What seems to be missing from this story is the time component. That is, if they don't do it now, they will have to do it later, and the longer they wait, the more it will cost. Every new record adds costs to the total, and that cost will be paid by the entire health-care-consuming public.
The question should not be whether this should be done, but how quickly the standard data formats can be agreed upon, and who should be on that committee. The trouble with standards is that they take so long to agree on. What the politicians doubtless haven't thought of yet is the standards process itself. Fortunately, a lot of that work has already been done by other countries. Unfortunately, being American, we'll try to reimplement from scratch, in a manner that will benefit some particular overpriced vendor that will lock us into their proprietary data format for the next 50 years. What we, the consumers, should be pushing for, is a truly open data format, and truly open API, mandated by law, so that any vendor will have access to this market, and can compete on a level playing field. My fear is that about six months from now we'll read a story about how MegaMediCo has "won the contract" to do this implementation.
...isn’t in storing stuff, it’s in storing only the good stuff. Update: See, what did I tell you - Rich Bowen: What we've been saying for *years* What seems to be missing from this story is the time component. That is, if they don't do it no...
*ahem* http://www.medsphere.com/
You know, it is interesting... In 1999 when I worked for Sutter Health, I was amazed at how well they had digitized their records. My group supported admissions, labs, and radiology. All of their x-rays, for example, were digitized. Any one of the over 5000 doctors in the 30+ hospitals could pull up any x-ray that was in their system. It was absolutely wonderful from a patient care perspective.
The down-side, of course, was in storing, backing up, and archiving all that data and the network to handle the transfers.
I know with radiological stuff - ct-scans, x-rays, etc. - there is a standard. I have ct-scans on a CD - Lexington Clinic has been keeping them electronically for 3-5 years now.
Well, don't forget the other underlying, possibly-most-important-of-all element: Security. Hospital staff are constantly facing discipline for accessing the files of people they don't have responsibility for and are not authorized to view. Just imagine the digitized version of George Clooney's next colonoscopy making the rounds on the net! Okay, don't actually imagine that. The point is that it's not just how to format the data, it's the recognition that people will go out of their way to peek (and profit) if there is any way at all to do it.