By David Lazarus
San Francisco Chronicle
April 13, 2007
“I’m not proposing to fix the entire system,” Grove said (Andy Grove, the former Intel Corp. chief exec and chairman). “I’m proposing to fix parts of it that are pragmatically addressable.”
Along those lines, he’s advocating a wholesale change in how people’s medical records are stored. As it stands, you visit a doctor or a hospital, your data are recorded on a clipboard, and that information, in turn, is often filed away in a paper folder.
Efforts are under way to store patient information electronically, but most such proposals include state-of-the-art technology that would keep data safe yet accessible to health care workers.
“All of a sudden there is an exponential increase of cost and complexity, and no one is doing anything,” Grove observed.
His alternative would be to create plain-vanilla Web pages for all patients that could be accessed by any nurse or doctor. You stroll into one of Grove’s walk-in clinics, explain your situation and your full medical file would be instantly available to whoever is seeing you.
This is indeed a pragmatic idea, but it has a fundamental drawback: personal medical records being clandestinely accessed by hackers. Grove acknowledges the problem.
“There are going to be breaches,” he said. “You will either learn to live with those breaches or you will retreat behind a wall of paper records. A perfect system, electronic or otherwise, would cost an infinite amount of money.”
Clearly, Grove’s remedies aren’t perfect.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/13/BUGGPP7RNF1.DTL
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
In preserving medical privacy, nothing short of perfect will do.
We can’t allow the debate on health care reform to be hijacked by those who would suggest that electronic information systems are the answer, perhaps along with expanding the children’s health insurance program.
When the politicians extol the virtues of information technology, remind them that they’re off topic. They need to tell us how they would reform health care financing for all of us.