Political Equinox

Please allow me to make this the unoffical Request for Proposal of the people of the United States in the area of a standardized format for heathcare information exchange.

The current landscape is a bunch of different electronic health record providers storing data in propritary formats, which don’t allow for potability of data at all.

A Massive Database

The most effective and efficient way of doing things would be a massive, centralized helthcare information database compliging healthcare data on every patient in the United States. However, this masive database brings several concerns in the playing field.

• Privacy - All of this highly confidential data stored in one location could be a breeding ground for trouble if someone received unauthorized access to the system.
• Control – We’d have to decide who would actually control, store, and pay for this data. Would it be our government?
• Logistics/Stability – storing all healthcare information in one location would create a massive database of information that may be prone to failures at key times; however, this is true of any systems.

This database would allow every doctor, nurse to instantly access a patients information no matter where they are in America. This would allow a patient to retrive information on any patient, whether they had been seeing that doctor for 20 years or were in an emergency room for the first time in a city while vacationing.

System Audit Trails would be put in place to ensure workers were only accessing the profiles of workers they were authorized to access.

A Portable Health Format

Because a massive database of patient healthcare information probably isn’t in our direct future because of the privacy, control, and logistical concerns we need to focus on developing a standardized format of exchaning healthcare information between different providers and their unqiue software systems.

While some hospitals are reaching our to groups of physicians to form a vertically integrated medical group to ensure portability of patient information (and customers, of course), our healthcare system needs a standard where a doctor can export a pateitns pertinant information and send it to a specialist, hospital, or other doctor.

This portable format would be somewhat like a PDF of your health history and while it wouldn’t be continually updated across all of your medical care, you could at least transfer some of the information.

Creating a portable healthcare exchange format is necessary step to get everyone on the same page in order to even think about moving to a centralized healthcare information exchange.