I thought that this reply (which was posted yesterday by Chris Hairel — an MSB MBA alum) was quite insightful.
Bottom line: we’re talking a Manhattan Project with savings (if any) far down the road)
A nationwide electronic medical records system represents the largest and most complex IT project in history.
There are several hundred government agencies, almost two thousand insurers, tens of thousands service and equipment providers, over 300 million patients with more than a billion records.
There are no data standards currently defined.
There are no security protocols in place.
Much of the data from paper notes and the rest must be converted from one electronic format to another.
It takes well run private companies 2 or 3 years or more to do an ERP or portal program. These are projects in controlled environments with processes and data that are much less complex than the human body and a stakeholder group several orders of magnitude less than the US health care system.
The National Health Service in the UK has had huge cost over runs and lost a prime contractor due to poor governance over data and metrics.
The IRS is years behind on their new audit system. The FAA has been after a new ATC system since the Reagan administration.
[Ken’s Note: Integration of our intelligence systems is still an incomplete work in progress — as evidenced by the Maj. Nassan slip-up that led to the Fort Hood massacre.]
Electronic health records won’t drive savings for quite a while – and certainly not by 2015 as currenlty promised in the government estimates.
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The Homa Files 
November 18, 2009 at 6:57 pm |
Although the point that a national, integrated electronic medical records system is a ways off is well taken, to say that there are no data standards and no security protocols in place misses the larger issue regarding data interoperability in the healthcare field.
Although I do agree with the premise that integrated eletronic medical records are a long ways off at a national level, the reason for that is not due to lack of standards in my opinion. HL7 and HIPAA standards date back to the mid-1990’s. Security protocols capable of safeguarding billions of dollars of commerce via networks and the internet have been around for nearly as long. No, the issue is not lack of standards, it’s lack of agreement on which standards to use, and where the line between public and private gets drawn.
“Health Level Seven is one of several American National Standards Institute (ANSI) -accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. Most SDOs produce standards (sometimes called specifications or protocols) for a particular healthcare domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance (claims processing) transactions. Health Level Seven’s domain is clinical and administrative data. ”
http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/ansiapproved.cfm