Obama's electronic medical requirements are within reach

The New York Times had an article this week that pointed out that the majority of medical offices making the switch to electronic medical records under President Obama's new plan, are not the huge enterprise variety, but most are actually small businesses with 10 doctors or even less, which makes this a small business issue, rather than an enterprise issue.

The president's plan includes cash payments to help doctors make the transition to electronic records. My own physician's office (which I would guess falls within the 10 or less metric) went electronic in the last year without this incentive. It took some training for the staff, who now carry around Tablet PCs and make all of their notes on the tablet where it gets transmitted to their central record keeping system. It required a complete cultural shift for the physicians, who were used to thumbing through paper records and it required some technical training to get them up and running, but in my experience dealing with the office, it has been a smooth process.

And this isn't exactly a new process. I wrote a column for Network World [1] in January, 2004 about a doctor, Arthur Lavin, who had made the transition to a paperless office in 2003 using Microsoft tools that are well within reach of most users. Even back then, Lavin recognized that it was time to shift away from paper when he said:

"Every time a piece of data comes in or out, or any time there’s a transaction, somebody has to pull the patient’s chart, [add] new information and refile the chart. That’s an awkward way to run a database."

If Dr. Lavin was doing it in 2003, while he was certainly an early adopter, it shows that this technology is all within reach and that even the smaller doctor's offices can do this, especially with monetary incentives to make the transition.

For more information, see:
The New York Times article [2]

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Electronic medial records news from [3]FierceCIO [3]