Obama announces plan for electronic health records for everyone

President-elect Obama is right to emphasize quality in his vision for electronic health records. Electronic health records may help us solve the healthcare quality problem, but if they are implemented solely as a technology initiative and we fail to fix the larger quality problem we will have an even higher cost but still broken system.Also, the privacy issue is indeed a key one. It is my understanding that the plan is not so much to build some uber-database with everyone's medical records, but rather to make the records interoperable so that care providers can reach across the healthcare infrastructure to access the information they need. With multiple IT heavyweights creating their own personal health record products, and with different EMR systems in place, the distributed approach is also more practical. I hope all these different solutions can play together.More discussion: www.healthcaretownhall.com

The public as well as the entire healthcare industry should be very cautious about jumping on board with this latest Obama proposal. We know nothing of the specifics of this initiative which is worrisome. Obama has stated time and time again that only government is the solution to our nation's problems. That in itself is enough to warrant extreme caution.

So much for HIPPA I hope they plan on enforcing the privacy laws. To easy for hackers to get into these records.

My health carrier provides online access to my med records incl. lab test results. It is WONDERFUL, it explains med. terms upon request, it eliminates much confusion and I can actually contact my doctor of choice via e-mail.
It is the polar opposite of my mothers carrier, United Healthcare who collects $, doesn't pay and lies about procedures.