Seattle – President Elect Barack Obama wants the medical records of people in the United States of America to be standardized and electronic. He thinks that this will help the economy because people will need to be hired to take on this large and difficult task. It will be a tough task to find workers who can make the technology and put it into use. The computer system will have to be up to date and protect people from having their medical records access by people who should not be looking at them.
The President Elect wants the country’s medical records to be computerized in the next five years. This will help to reduce high medical costs.
Barack Obama campaigned on getting Americans a better quality of health care. It is very important to Americans that they have better health care. Millions of people are currently without health insurance.
Most hospitals do not use computerized medical records. There are only about four hundred hospitals in the United States that use computerized medical records. This is a very small amount considering that there are five thousand hospitals in the United States of America. Approximately one hundred and thirty six thousand doctors use computerized medical records. However, there are eight hundred thousand doctors in the United States of America so this is not a significant amount.
It will be very difficult to make sure that every doctor has a computer with the Internet in their office. Many doctors have computers but they do not keep computerized records, they just fill in charts and keep handwritten records. If patients need their medical records to be transferred then a receptionist or office worker will need a records request to be filled out by the patient. Then they will fax copies of the patients’ medical records to the doctor or hospital.
The cost of putting together a computerized system for the medical records of the United States would cost between seventy five and one hundred billion dollars. This is a very big price tag. It would be over a time period of ten years, but right now the nation’s economy is very bad. Seven hundred billion tax dollars have already been allocated towards bailing out the financial industry. This has increased the federal deficit by a lot of money.
The main problem that workers that are designing the new computer system will face is how to make the system easy for every medical professional to understand. It has to be easy accessible and be very accurate since mixing up the medical records could cause medical mistakes to be made.
The plan that the President Elect has put forth to the public does sound promising. Many people in the United States go to hospitals and doctors all the time without having knowledge of their entire medical history. Even leaving off one medication or illness could cause medical errors to be made. There have been pilot programs implemented to try and see if this technology will be successful and save tax payers money. Hopefully, the computerized medical records system can be implemented in all fifty states. It would help Americans have better health care and at this time we all need it because obesity, cancer, and diseases are big concerns in the minds of Americans.
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