In answer to last week's study suggesting that initial installations of electronic health records aren't proving as effective as hoped, Overheard in Providence offers up a corrective to the doubters, and looks into a future filled with health information technology and the many fruits of its abundance:
If EMRs [electronic medical records] become widespread, they open the door to a huge new area of medical research. Computer-aided diagnosis is going to get a lot better if millions of anonymized medical records become available. A few years ago I went to a talk by MIT professor Peter Szolovits. He was able to use a computer to diagnose certain heart conditions from audio recordings better than most doctors. EMRs would greatly facilitate the development of automated screening procedures. More importantly, when new procedures are developed, they could be applied retroactively to data collected years earlier, even when a patient stops seeing a doctor. There's absolutely no way to do this now.
EMRs would also be a huge boon to public health research. Researchers could be given access to a huge data base of anonymous medical records, all in a standard format. It would be trivial to check if two conditions are correlated, or if one disease occurs more often in some segment of the population. The amount of data would be so large, a doctor could even search for records similar to their patent, and use those records as a guide for what health problems to watch for.
Finally EMRs make much better use of healthcare we already provide. If you go in for surgery, all sorts of equipment is used to monitor your well-being. This data should be recorded and reviewed by a doctor who isn't busy cutting you open. If you go in for a 3D bodyscan, even more data is collected. The scan could easily be reviewed by experts in other parts of the country, provided they have access to your EMR.
I tend to plug EMRs in terms of their immediate and obvious benefits: Reduction in paper, reduction in cost, reduction in lost records, simple programs that prescription errors, etc. But this is all correct, too. The widespread implementation of EHRs could trigger enormous change in the way medicine is practiced, and could accelerate many, many types of research. The downside here is that there are obvious and clear privacy concerns, but as genetic risk profiling inches ever closer to reality, these are issues we're going to have to deal with one way or the other.
