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Obama's Plan for Electronic Medical Records

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Obama's Plan for Electronic Medical Records Empty Obama's Plan for Electronic Medical Records

Post  Mark Straccia Mon Apr 13, 2009 12:35 am

One of Obama's health care plan is make all the medical records electronic. The idea is to put all the information on a centralized electronic database. This is helpful because it limits the number of nodes and path length a person would have go through to get to the information (and when there is a medical emergency, time is very important). It also helps in another way (which we have not talked about in class) by increasing the speed it takes to move along a path. When the information is electronic, it is much faster to access the information than if you have to go through a person and get a paper file.

This more simplified system means information can be more easily accessed but it also means that it is easier for someone to hack in and steal all the private information (which would be a huge embarrassment for the administration). This a big problem for any system that is more interconnected: though it is easier to get to other nodes, it is also likely the interconnection could be used for harm. Before it would have taken months to travel from Japan to America but now it only takes a few hours. This is why there is such a big scary when a new disease develops (like SARS) just because we are so connected to each other that a disease could engulf the world in a few days.

Mark Straccia

Posts : 37
Join date : 2009-04-01

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Obama's Plan for Electronic Medical Records Empty Re: Obama's Plan for Electronic Medical Records

Post  patrickmccoy Mon Apr 13, 2009 12:46 am

I think the best alternative (in terms of implementation and cost) is to just give any hospital access to any other hospital's patient database. This would be much easier than creating a centralized database as the data is already electronic at most hospitals, and thus would just have to be made public to any other place that needed it.

It would also create a distributed network of data, and would not rely on a central place to store all of the patient information. If this central data center were attacked (either physically or hacked), then the medical records for all the people in the US would be inaccessible and people could possibly die. The downside to this would be searching for the information needed, as it could be spread out amongst many hospitals for each individual patient, but since internet connection speeds are increasing daily, this would probably not make a noticeable difference to the people accessing the data. It is going to be interesting to figure out what the final solution is going to be for this problem, and how it is going to affect the health care system.

patrickmccoy

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http://www.pjmccoy.com

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