How Electronic Medical Records Exploded In Doctors’ Faces And Politicians Got Off Scot-Free The past decade of throwing taxpayers’ money at health information technology makes the Solyndra boondoggle look like chump change.
By Greg Scandlen
June 9, 2017 More than a decade ago the media were excited that Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich had formed an alliance about reforming health care. In 2005 Dana Milbank wrote in gushing terms in the Washington Post about a joint appearance.
“Clinton, asked about electronic medical records, deferred, again, to her friend. ‘Newt has a very dramatic way of saying this,’ she said, ‘which is “Paper kills.”’ Gingrich sent the praise right back at her, hailing Clinton’s legislation on medical records as a ‘major breakthrough’ in Congress. ‘This is absolutely the case that Hillary is making,’ he said.”
Of course, they were not alone. President Bush had already embraced the idea in his State of the Union speech to Congress. He envisioned a new era of “improved information technology to prevent medical error and needless costs.”
Later, President Obama built the HITECH Act into his 2009 stimulus package and appropriated some $20 billion in the first year alone to make it happen. All promised to get everyone’s complete medical records in digital form by 2014.
How are your medical records today? I recently had cataract surgery at my local hospital. They did each eye one month apart. Each time I had to complete the exact same questionnaire about my allergies, the drugs I’m taking, and my medical history. Apparently their information technology couldn’t retain the information for even a month.
We Could Have Foreseen This OutcomeThe past decade of throwing taxpayers’ money at health information technology (HIT) makes the Solyndra boondoggle look like chump change. None of this should have been remotely surprising to anyone looking objectively at the evidence. In 2006, the United Kingdom’s $12 billion effort to computerize medical records in the National Health Service was already falling apart, according to a report to Parliament. A few years later, the government candidly admitted it had wasted all the money and was closing the program.
In the United States, even more modest efforts by our own government had already failed. The Veterans Administration spent $167 million to simply computerize its appointments system. This effort had “all but collapsed, and senior executives are worried about the repercussions it could cause on the Hill and in the White House, according to an internal memo obtained by NextGov,” a trade publication.
At the Department of Defense “top health officials lambasted the department’s central electronic health record system that manages patient files for millions of active duty and retired service members, saying it frustrates doctors because it crashes as often as once a week and generates duplicate records,” again according to NextGov. The article goes on to quote the deputy surgeon general of the Air Force as saying the system was, “slow, unreliable and so cumbersome that clinicians spend 40 percent of their time inputting data into the system, which is time spent away from patients.”
There was absolutely no evidence that this massive spending would succeed, and plenty that it would fail miserably. Now, even the editors of the Washington Post came to agree the whole project was a fiasco — but only after we wasted $27 billion of taxpayer money.
Doctors Warned About This ‘Exercise in Wishful Thinking’On the ground where real people live and actual doctors practice medicine, the warning signs were nearly universal, both before the law was enacted and as it was being implemented. I wrote a report for the Heartland Institute summarizing the problems.
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/09/electronic-medical-records-exploded-doctors-faces-politicians-got-off-scot-free/
