Electronic Medical Records - Pro or Con?

For this weeks blog I’m going to go back to my old life and put on my political hat to talk about electronic medical records. 

If you’re one of the many looking for change between the Bush and Obama Administrations, you won’t find it when it comes to the government’s push to replace patient charts written and kept in a hospital or doctor’s office with Electronic Medical Records. The Bush presidency made it a high priority to convert the nation’s medical records to electronic databases, and President Obama plans to stay the course. 

The justification given for the $825 billion estimated expense of converting medical record-keeping from paper files to electronic files is two-fold. Advocates claim that electronic records will reduce overall health care spending and eliminate medical errors which cause more than 100,000 deaths annually. So far, neither claim has been proven. In some communities electronic medical records have been universally implemented on a trial basis, but no evidence has yet been published to substantiate either the claim of reduced costs or fewer deadly errors.

The special interests who are pushing for the mandatory conversion to electronic medical records are technology firms like Microsoft, specialty-software companies, and medical suppliers including pharmaceutical firms. Collectively, these companies spend tens of millions of dollars annually lobbying Congress. Federal Election Commissions reports show that the Obama-Biden campaign raised more money from these special interests than the McCain-Palin ticket. Why do these companies care about our medical records? Because they stand to reap billions of dollars in profits if the medical records of all Americans are made easily searchable through data-mining. 

Here’s an example of how the system works today. Aggregate data on the prescription drugs doctors prescribe to patients is gathered in a database by the American Medical Association and access to the database is sold to pharmaceutical firms. The firms use software to determine whether your doctor is prescribing their medication, or a competitors’ medication, for a particular medical condition. The data can also be mined to see if doctors are “underprescribing” their medication for certain conditions like high cholesterol or diabetes or asthma, based on patient demographics such as age. Armed with this data, pharmaceutical firm sales representatives fan out across the U.S. to individual doctors to encourage them to prescribe more of their firm’s medications to patients. Data collected by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) in a lengthy probe show that pharmaceutical firms spend an average of $10,000 on every physician – often in the form of free travel to exotic destinations – marketing them to prescribe their products to patients.

Imagine how much more efficient this gigantic marketing machine will be when every medical supplier in the country, from hospitals to drug makers to makers of surgical implants, can data mine the records of every American. Every visit you make to a doctor, dentist, psychiatrist, pharmacist, and hospital could, and I think will, be scrutinized in a nanosecond. By matching your medical data with other consumer, lifestyle, and personal details maintained by credit reporting agencies like Experian, sales teams will be able to use your personal medical records to push doctors to sell you more goods and services. Perhaps it will improve your health; it will certainly increase medical spending.