Some health care industry specialists are warning against investing too heavily in existing electronic health record systems as President-elect Barack Obama plans to include funding for the technology in an economic stimulus package, the Boston Globe reports.
In a recent open letter to Obama, David Kibbe, a senior adviser to the American Academy of Family Physicians, and Bruce Klepper, a health care market analyst, wrote that the current systems are costly, difficult to use and do not allow hospitals, physician offices or pharmacies to easily share information about patients' medical histories and treatments.
They wrote, "If America's physician practices suddenly rushed to install the systems of their choice, it would only dramatically intensify the (tower of) Babel that already exists."
Kibbe and Klepper wrote that some of the stimulus package should go toward EHRs but that the majority of funding for health IT should be used for less costly and simpler technology, such as rewarding physicians for using computers to communicate with specialists and patients. Funding also should be used to help extend high-speed Internet access to doctors who do not have it, they wrote.
According to the Globe, the letter "highlights the challenges confronting Obama's proposal to digitize an enormous and fragmented health care system." The Globe reports, "Those who set standards for electronic health records want to get as many doctors as possible using the technology and work out the kinks over time, while also investing in infrastructure to help share data."
David Blumenthal -- a Harvard Medical School professor and director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Partners HealthCare System who advised the Obama campaign on EHRs -- told the Globe that health IT advocates are concerned that the U.S. could get locked into the imperfect health record system.
He said, "I think this really is a question of how good does it have to be before you pull the trigger. There's no correct answer to that, but for me, the evidence tips toward acting now, not with total abandon, but making a substantial but prudent investment in health IT" (Wangsness, Boston Globe, 1/1).