Health Care Record Industry Overview
Tommy Peterson (2004) said that the country's medical records system or the lack thereof is just one of the things wrong with the way in which health care is delivered in the United States. On the other hand, the federal government has introduced a plan that would require health care service providers to take advantage of information technology (IT) to establish a health information infrastructure consisting of a consolidated electronic health record (EHR) for every American and to build a nationwide network for securely transporting these records to health care providers. However, as Peterson (2004) notes, though the potential benefits of the system are enormous, there are a number of concerns regarding this ambiguous health records initiative.
Specifically, the benefits associated with EHR system development include improved availability of health records, enhanced communication among caregivers, decision support data, improvements in prescription safety, quality measurement generation, and the streamlining of medical record maintenance costs (Bates, 2004). Estimates of financial savings resulting from streamlined health care administration, the elimination of redundant care, and improved record maintenance ranked nearly as high as nearly half a trillion dollars per year (Peterson, 2004).
Most health care executives - providers and payers alike - want to more forward on EHRs (Electronic health recordsà, 2004). However, as yet, only about 14 percent of all hospitals have implemented some form of EHR and even fewer physicians groups have done so. Part of the explanation for this slow start in using IT for health records is the cost of creating EHRs for large patient populations. Other challenges include determining how to identify individual patients, how to ensure privacy and confidentiality of all medical records and how to network such a database to ensure easy access while ma...