Technology can be both a blessing and a curse and nowhere is this more painfully evident than in the U.S. health care system. If technology is to be used to improve the patient-doctor relationship, its systems should be designed by physicians who understand these needs, not by regulators and health care conglomerates for whom business objectives are paramount. When it’s all about billing and meeting documentation checkboxes and hospital requirements, clinicians are diverted from their core mission and patient care suffers.
A good use of technology would be the creation of a single compatible medical record system that enables all doctors to access each patient’s records of care. The banks did this with ATM systems 45 years ago and they trust this system with trillions of dollars. ATM systems all over the world adhere to a common protocol and security framework, while the banks’ security and consumer privacy are maintained with PINs, passwords, two-step verification and other measures.
This solution should be adapted for the health care system as well. Data could be stored centrally and accessible from anywhere across health systems and locations. When a patient sees a new health care provider, the physician can log in for immediate access to all previous health records, including a list of active and inactive problems, lab results, imaging, procedures, and outcomes. This is a far cry from our current system in which primary care providers and specialists waste endless hours trying to track down each other’s data while patients – the real owners of these records – wait to be treated.
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