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Ano Lobb | Friday 20th November 2009
A reader comment on a posting about electronic medical records (EMR) suggests that medicine needs to follow other industries into the digital age. This is likely inevitable: Medical record keeping is bound to become more digitized over time.  The primary reasons are monetary: It facilitates the generation of bills to send to patients and payers, the jury is still out on whether it increases quality and efficiency. Individual providers may like the added convenience, but it is still unlikely that EMR will provide the level of care coordination that is hoped for.

President Obama and others have proclaimed that EMR will also bring massive cost savings, but a new study released today sheds doubt on these projections. Harvard researchers analyzed over 4,000 hospitals and found no differences in administrative or overall costs between the most- and least-wired hospitals. More techie establishments did have a faster rate of cost increase, however. As for quality, more wired institutions had slightly higher quality scores for heart attack care, but not for pneumonia or heart failure, and not for all three combined. (These were process-measures, not outcomes measures.)

Another point worth making is that the business of healthcare doesn't operate like other industries, for example:
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