As a precursor to President Obama’s healthcare law, lawmakers much more readily embraced a less partisan and controversial healthcare idea. The mass adoption of electronic health records was part of the 2009 stimulus package that many people liked on both sides of the aisle. It would become a key concept within the context of healthcare reform.
There were some concerns about medical privacy, but on paper, electronic medical records made sense. As long as doctors needed to keep and share information on patients’ health, why not put it in a format that makes the process simpler and quicker?
Proponents also claimed that a transition to electronic record keeping would bring about massive savings in healthcare costs – up to $81 billion per year, according to an oft-cited 2005 study by RAND Corporation. Thus, lawmakers approved a $30 billion incentive program to push doctors and hospitals into the information age.
But as the Washington Examiner‘s Richard Pollock reported this week, this program is now lurching toward an early death. With tens of billions of dollars spent, only about 3 percent of America’s doctors and 16 percent of its hospitals now have record keeping systems that can interoperate with one another.
Even worse, nearly half of the medical professionals participating in the incentive program are now expected to drop out. This comes as little surprise, given the widespread doctor complaints that the requirements of “meaningful use” of technology leave them spending more time looking at their iPads than talking to patients.
This entire episode demonstrates how groupthink helped lead Americans into a healthcare reform regime that was both overly centralized and badly thought-out.
For one thing, it turns out that lawmakers were ridiculously over-optimistic about electronic records, as some critics had warned. RAND’s 2005 study, which was funded by tech companies, had told them exactly what every Obamacare supporter wanted to hear – that there was a silver bullet, a panacea they could simply apply on a national scale to reduce healthcare costs significantly. They’ve since received a rude awakening. Last January, RAND came out with a follow-up to its 2005 study, which found there was in fact no evidence of savings at all from the use of electronic medical records. In fact, electronic records might actually increase the overall cost of providing care.
Second – and this might come as a shock – the federal bureaucrats who developed the standards for approved records systems lacked the understanding required to manage an entire sub-industry. This resulted in vendors developing multiple incompatible systems. It is 2014, and American taxpayers are stuck with a very expensive version of the classic early-1990s Mac-PC compatibility problem.
As Pollock reports, many doctors – even ones that work in the same hospital – have reverted to faxing medical records to one another.
The lesson cannot be repeated often enough. Government is bad at simple solutions. It’s good at spending lots of money to make problems worse.
