from the New York TImes Science section this morning - a doctor talks about what's broken in health care - not in delivery systems like medicare, but in hospitals, caring for the dying, etc. THis is something we've discussed here often.
EMRs are not quite the godsend that the government would have you believe. Doctors do not enjoy slamming away at a keyboard for 8 hours a day and therefore a MINIMUM of information is entered in the computer. I work in a clinic that uses paper charts and l can tell you that lives (and eyesight) have been saved by notes scribbled in the margins. Maybe lab tests, scans, x-rays, mammograms et al and their interpretation should be electronically retrievable, but digitizing every visit to every provider will result in doctors spending more time looking at the computer screen than looking at their patients. I don't know a single doctor that thinks that dealing with EMR has made them a better doctor or provided better care to their patients. However, your new life/health insurance company is going to love knowing that you saw a psychiatrist/psychologist in 2009 for depression.
What the doctors will probably end up doing is having to hire a typist or computer enty person to enter their scribbled notes into the patients' records. Personal Health Records are the wave of the future. They have already started it. It is supposed to make it easier to get good care where ever you are when you become ill or have an accident. It will be interesting whether the public will go along with it or fight it. I'm not comfortable with having my record online, due to the possibilities of hacking, but I don't guess we will have a choice.
The amount of good EMR will do will be heavily outweighed by the life/health insurance companies who will make doing business with them dependent on access to your health records. You won't be able to hide anything. Good luck with your kids getting decent rates on disability/health/life insurance with a parental history of AD. If you think the government is going to protect your interests, you haven't been paying attention to the influence that large corporations have over BOTH political parties.
Our PCP told me to call him IMMEDIATELY if ANYTHING went wrong. He said he does not want either one of us in an ER if it at all possible to avoid it. He said with so many sick people in there, it's too easy to pick up something and at our ages, we are too vulnerable.
I have specifically told my CNA who comes weekly that if anything happens she is to call ME. NOT 911. I thought I'd made that clear to the agency, and in the notes I leave behind but I guess not.