When recently a Lancaster General Hospital (LGH) physician was taking a detailed health history, the patient asked “After living in Lancaster over 40 years, how come this data isn’t already in your computer system? I thought the hospital spent $100 million for this purpose.” The response was “Just a $100 million?”
Not only has LGH spent the money on an electronic patient health and medical record keeping system to serve its own needs, but medical practices throughout the region are also spending tens of million to establish their own electronic medical record keeping systems. Yet much of the data will not be accessible beyond the individual entity.
LGH’s digital medical storage system is to come on line late this summer. Should it need to be scrapped within five years in order to replace it with a nationally standardized system, the directors will not necessarily be to blame. The same applies to private practices.
The federal government had declined to establish software standards for hospitals and medical practices as it has provided for other industries. It would have been simple to have utilized the Veteran Administration’s proven health record system, developed over twenty years, as a starting point.
Why didn’t this happen? We surmise that this would have curtailed the opportunity for private industry to sell billions of dollars of their own software to health organizations throughout the nation.
How many lobbyists were working for the software industry and how many were representing the consumer?
The result…instead of having a fully integrated national medical record keeping system so that a sick Lancaster resident could receive prompt and thorough treatment elsewhere in the country and possibly abroad, the country will have a hodgepodge of a facsimile. And the huge profits (called “surpluses”) generated by public charity Lancaster General Hospital over the past few years may go largely down the drain.
