Where are the true believers? – Good Experience: Or should we invest $50 billion in a new electronic medical record? That’s the proposal from the government, and I can’t imagine it changing anything. [I know they won’t for two reasons… and in this case I will stick to the computer tech of the situation. When I worked at a compnay that worked with hospitals, i saw first hand the mess that is many hospitals data infrastructure. I mean it’s really truly horrible. Monolithic, badly engineered hacks rule the day. I can imagine how it got there… but I blame the administrators who obviously invested the bare minimum in their infrastructure and now have a huge morass out of which to climb. Second is at a more personal level. I have a fine primary care physician. I trust him, he pays attention, knows the family history, etc. Because of the business side of the doctoring business he joined the equivalent of a conglomerate, which naturally centers their IT cost. All good, except they have a EMR system and when it fails to connect to the database (I wasn’t there as a tech, but as a patient) the system is worthless. No EKG or other tests. No access to records, no updates. Just a few simple paper pages to record new information that no doubt will have to be transcribed (with errors) by the staff. It’s 2009 for criminies sake… what the hell is that? No local storage? No syncing of records? What a freakin mess. And this from a major player in health care in my area. “Sucks” doesn’t begin to describe it…

BTW, as for the true believers… I think they’re there. I’m just not sure there’s enough of them where it matters.]