DISQUS

Electronic Medical Records Guy · 2 years ago

What good is a Google Personal Health Record (or any other personal health record, for that matter) if the vast majority of physicians are still practicing medicine with paper and a pencil? Should we first focus on helping doctors transition to electronic medical records, and then spend our time helping patients create personal health records? Or do you think millions of personal health records will force physicians to implement an EMR? In the end, any personal health record needs to "talk" to all the electronic medical record systems out there!

EMR Software Guy,
http://www.electronic-medical-record.blogspot.com

David P. Hamilton · 2 years ago

EMR guy, you raise an excellent point. I could imagine this playing out in a few different ways. If lots of people start putting their information into Google Health and then insisting that their doctors find ways to access it, that could conceivably create an incentive for physician practices to digitize. I think that's kind of a big if -- I'm not sure what, exactly, patients are going to value in EMRs if they can't take them to their doctors to begin with, and the privacy concerns still loom pretty large.

Meanwhile, as I've said a number of times, any effort to push doctors into the Internet Age needs to grapple with the fact that it's going to cost them more to digitize their practices than they'll save, at least in the short run. It's a nifty catch-22, in fact.