Big Employers Plan Electronic Health Records

[nodular]

Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2006, page B1

"Intel, Wal-Mart, BP and others will disclose a plan to provide digital health records to their employees and store them in a multimillion dollar data warehouse linking hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies. Their goal: to cut costs by having customers coordinate their own health care among doctors and hospitals...

...Next week, the companies will announce their collaboration on a records standard to kickstart the plan. Later, about 10 employers are expected to chip in $1.5 million each to construct a data warehouse to store and update the e-records. Once in place, the combination would allow consumers and insurers to evaluate price and performance data from millions of employees. Eliminating duplicate tests and erroneous or lost information would also slash administrative overhead, which is estimated to account for 40% of medical costs. And electronic prescriptions alone could help prevent the 98,000 serious illnesses or deaths that result annually from prescription mistakes.

Doctors could also use the records to measure which treatments work best for chronically ill groups of patients. In addition, once the records are online, employees could order prescriptions and calculate their out-of-pocket medical costs using software that understands their health plans."

[Target_For_Exterm]

1. New way to fire employees who are sick?

I don't trust big business with medical records.

[Norquist Nemesis]

2. Need a refresher...isn't this the same thing Hillary and Newt

were working on (together) a few years ago? This all sounds vaguely familiar...

[nodular]

6. yes, I believe it's the same thing (and that's a good point)...

but Hillary and Newt don't have quite as much cash as these guys. This isn't just an idea, they are planning to do it.

[OzarkDem]

3. Since some of these employers don't offer health plans

why in the world would they want to spend money to "help" their employees store and share their medical information? Will they then have grounds to fire you when you declare bankruptcy over inability to pay health care costs?

This is one of those proposals the DLC supports under the guise of health care reform. What a joke.

[Clark2008]

5. That brings up another point: why would your employer even

HAVE your health records?

Shouldn't that reside in the hands of your doctors? And only your doctors?

[KT2000]

4. Have electronic records

where I live, which is a rural community. Info is shared between medical personnel and the only hospital. Works well for emergencies, especially if the person is unconscious.
Drawback is that a misdiagnosis follows you everywhere you go and is then reinforced.

I do not trust corporations having this info though. For a time, a large medical corporation "owned" my personal doctor. All of his patients' records were copied by the corporation and sent somewhere. The corporation left town but I have to wonder where my copied records have ended up.

Wonder how much data mining companies pay for such things?!?!?!