Yes, it's going to be expensive. Yes, it's going to take a long time. It's going to be both because US doctors have been living in the stone ages for decades and have successfully pushed back modernization for so long. In order to build a national health care solution these first steps must be taken. Having watched some of the nationalized systems in Europe (from an IT perspective) this makes sense. The UK system began talking about such a system a few decades ago and are only now implementing it and France is set to launch a large scale modernization this year.
Again, instead of trickling out $500 to people, start hiring people who will design and build such systems and get the ball rolling. People need jobs in this economy and such a project will pump a lot of money into the system. It will require new computers, data entry, IT architecture, developers, etc so it's a broad swath of workers who will be hired. Quit the excuses and get started. Now.
Here's the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline.
Sounds good. But it won't be easy.
In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation's 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. And some experts say that serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed first. Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology.
"The hard part of this is that we can't just drop a computer on every doctor's desk," said Dr. David Brailer, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, who served as President Bush's health information czar from 2004 to 2006. "Getting electronic records up and running is a very technical task."
It also won't come cheap. Independent studies from Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund have shown that such a plan could cost at least $75 billion to $100 billion over the ten years they think the hospitals would need to implement program.
