Children's Hospital plans $25M IT investment

There seems to be a rat race driven by the testosterone of high speed connectivity and raw computing power that makes the CEOs of hospital declare they are fully connected and in sync with the President's IT policy. The media reports these events in the same vein. Billions have been poured into EMRs with very little to show for it. Unless hospitals know what they are going to do with the information they are gathering, it will be a road down a financial abyss for these hospitals which are reeling under the onslaught of competition from private clinics, single specialty centers combined with steep cuts in reimbursement ( look at the mistake of EPIC proportions made by the Kaiser group in CA). What the hospitals and hospital physicians need is a proper searchable digital filing system which can be accessed by any treating physician with patient's permission from any computer connected to the internet. There is NO reason to make EMRs anything but patient centric. Making EMRs useful to administrators, insurance companies and pharmaceutical benefit managers will serve the patients poorly at a huge expense to the taxpayers. It is a hospital funded welfare system for the computer geeks. There is no reason to increase bandwidth and waste lot of money. There is NO reason why a primary care physician wants to download 400 MB digital MRI scan to his office computer. I do not blame the vendors of EMR and computer systems for selling snake oil. The blame for this kind of excess lies squarely on the hospital administrators and key physicians who recommend these systems without researching their specific needs. Until they understand these complex issues properly it is better for the President and his inner circle to keep out of revolutionary IT ideas for the healthcare sector. Let us fix the looming problem of catastrophic healthcare at affordable price for all Americans first!