Why we must invest in electronic medical records (1)

Part 1.

At a Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center just a few miles from my office in the United States Capitol, visitors can see the future of American medicine. Sitting at an ordinary desktop computer, Dr. Ned Evans hits a few keys on the keyboard and clicks his mouse a few times. Sample patient data spill out: X-ray images, lab notes and blood-pressure numbers. "Everything I might want, everything I need, I can see right here," he says. "It's a seamless part of life. It lets me do just about everything better."
And when the New England Journal of Medicine used 11 measures to compare VA patients treated in the VA's own hospitals with Medicare patients treated in a mixture of private and public hospitals, the VA's patients were in better health and received more of the treatments professionals believe they should. According to the VA's own medical professionals, a computer system called Vista is the key to their success. "I'm proud of what we do here, but it isn't that we have more resources," explains Stanford Garfunkle, the director of the Washington VA Medical Center. "The difference is information."
While the VA has invested a lot in its computer system, most hospitals, clinics and doctors haven't invested enough. Among America's important economic sectors, health care spends the smallest percentage of its revenue on information technology -- only about 3 percent. Industries such as banking spend 10 percent or more.
Our underinvestment in health-information technology has dire consequences for all Americans. Researchers at Dartmouth University found that America wastes as much as a third of the $1.8 trillion it spends on medical care -- much of the waste comes from disorganization and lack of information. This, in turn, results in orders for unneeded tests, ineffective procedures and simple human error. Sometimes our failure to use health information technology has deadly consequences. Doctors write about 2 billion prescriptions each year but, because of unclear handwriting, some get filled incorrectly; about 7,000 people die each year as a result. Even worse, enormous disparities exist in the quality of health-care patients receive. Members of some ethnic minorities, residents of rural areas and people with low incomes are more likely to have complex health problems than members of other groups yet are less likely to receive appropriate, high- quality care. At least some of the difference is attributable to the lack of good medical records. So good medical records is important.( countinued..)

William H. Frist