Going Digital
Technology continues to reinvent itself, as is healthcare. Bringing these two together is a tough job that should be supported and promoted to enhance the care patients is able to receive nationwide. Everything these days is going digital, so why not your medical records.

A scenario we’ve all experienced – going to a new doctor and fill out forms for 30 minutes or what seems like endless amount of paperwork that is basically the exact same paperwork you completed at the past 3 doctors’ offices you visited over the years. This frustration and waste of time could be averted if your doctor was able to log on to a secure website and retrieve your records before you even arrive at the office. Imagine, instead of being greeted with a stack of paperwork to fill out you are greeted with a smile and asked to come right in for your checkup. Similarly, if you are in a serious accident, unconscious and there is no-one around that knows your medical history, the hospital can simply type your name into a secure website and bring up all your paperwork to know, for example, that do to an allergy they should not give you penicillin. For seniors taking a large number of medications a doctor can log online and see what prescriptions the senior person is taking in order to ensure what he prescribes does not react negatively to any of their other prescriptions and with a press of the button send the prescription to their pharmacy to be ready for pickup when they leave his office.
All this is possible, but the implementation of this healthcare technology is very slow. Hospitals and doctors are slowly getting wired into the internet and learning both the software and websites necessary to make this possible. Health Information Technology (HIT) which is the name doctors and hospitals have dubbed this new innovation for the use of online medical records has unlimited benefits for patients and healthcare providers. Digitizing these functions greatly assists doctors and hospitals avoid mistakes, reduce costs and improve patient care.

Doctors will have a safe guard against prescribing the wrong prescription and hospitals will not have to worry about keeping millions of pages of paper on file but will be able to easily access each patient’s history at a click of a button.

Even though the possibilities are endless there are, of course, obstacles. These obstacles include patient privacy rights and the use of sensitive information getting into the wrong hands. The efforts of Congress and President Bush’s Administration to speed up the digitations process of implementing HIT nationwide has stalled. Many medical professionals do not fully trust an online system to have the proper security and safeguards. People are also afraid insurance companies will be able to retrieve medical records thereby causing individual’s premiums to go up or even get kicked out of their insurance company.

There is no doubt that HIT will revolutionize healthcare. However, for doctors the main obstacle is the cost of a HIT system. A typical HIT system for a doctor’s office can cost $20,000 to $80,000 – a hefty price for a practice that already is being pummeled with high insurance premiums. Nonetheless, going digital is inevitable as the advantages are enormous to the health of the public in general and senior citizens in particular.