Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Kaiser, Microsoft test medical records technology

Permanente and Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a partnership that the two giant companies hope will push forward the effort to digitize medical records and safely transfer sensitive health data.

Kaiser's 156,000 employees will be eligible for a pilot program connecting the Oakland health maintenance organization's health records with Microsoft's HealthVault, a free, Web-based medical database the technology giant launched in October.

The slow shift of the American health industry from paper medical files to digitized records has been fraught with complications, a major one being that hospitals, medical groups and insurance companies typically have closed computer systems that do not allow for the exchange of information.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/09/BUD1114PTD.DTL

Interesting. What I find most interesting about these health records is how they are not completely objective. The patient picks and chooses what goes in. So, they are diagnosed with a condition which they don't agree with or don't want to believe in (I do not have an anxiety disorder! I'm not depressed! I DO have an underactive thyroid)they just simply "doctor" the record and leave those things out.

Wayne this is exactly why it is very important for CLINICIANS to get involved in these processes. If it is driven by the insurance companies...it will be insurance centric!

Wayne makes an excellent point though. The heck with even the insurance carriers, what about the patients "doctoring" and editing their own records. Many times we have documented that last bad phonecall or storm out of our office incident because we didn't give in to the patients demands for Rx's they shouldn't have and a thousand other things. There is a real difference between what a private citizen compiles verses what a clinical official, line thru, never destructive record is.

This may be a nice way for patients to have a record of the health information but there is a real difference between a mom walking in with a supposed photocopy of her kids shot records vs. the shot records sent doctor to doctor. Which one would you trust when your doctor has to sign off on some new kids shot records for the state and the school district??? This is will and always should be seen an electronic version of the folder with lots of notes, test results, that the anal for well informed patient walks in with. It is NOT anywhere near an official properly compiled by many accepted ground rules clinical medical record....

Whether it is carrier centric or crazy patient centric it is not and never should be seen or accepted as a real clinical medical record.... It the difference between talking to the pharmacy or getting a copy of the records from another licensed provider, vs the patient that walks in well intentioned with a nice hand written or typed list of all the meds they are on.... The difference between a doc documented a kid got a chicken pox shot or officially saw and Dx'ed Chicken Pox verses mom reporting last year the kid had a case of chicken pox. No official doctors record of the shot or chicken pox, then the kid gets the shot....

But this is not being developed as a tool for some vast conspiracy to create fraudulent records. It is being developed to fill a void where a real need exists. People have blood work done, go to see the specialist and the same labs are ordered again because we are often too busy to try to get the records of what was already done. The result is a dramatic waste of time and money. We need to be rapid in our adoption of the 'Medical Home Model' to assure that the PCP has a complete set of the records, ORGANIZED and ready to be used by the specialist we refer to or the Emergency room our patient lands in.

HockeyRef wrote:

"Whether it is carrier centric or crazy patient centric it is not and never should be seen or accepted as a real clinical medical record.... It the difference between talking to the pharmacy or getting a copy of the records from another licensed provider, vs the patient that walks in well intentioned with a nice hand written or typed list of all the meds they are on...."

Have you read the specs? How are you in a position to use such strong language "AS NEVER?" This type of language scares the hell out of me...because it says your mind is already made up and unyeilding no matter what the facts are.

Hello Everyone, been a while since I have visited, but thought I would pipe in here and make mention that the "Medical Quack" has a lot of information I post on PHRs. Somewhere along the line I received an invite to a town hall thing on the certification of them, but didn't have the time. Will see if they invite me any more.

Here's a link to a search on the HealthVault on the site.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/search?q=healthvault&x=0&y=0

Anyway, if you haven't seen one of these, more sites are starting to use them now.


http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/search?q=healthvault&x=0&y=0

Be sure and read this one below in the mesh, I got a few folks upset of this one back in DC, but hey what are blogs for. If they haven't updated since 2004, there's an issue.http://www.amazingcharts.com/ub/images/icons/default/blush.gif
blush

Family Health Portrait from the US Surgeon General – Duplication of Efforts

Anyway, still plenty of tablet information there and information about the 10 hour battery. If you haven't been over for a while, have a new format.

Also, been getting some major publications paying some attention and here's a sample post from Reuters.

http://www.reuters.com/article/blog...A1mB4i22hiR9pHlCzAlwocBDhNICBEkwxJ20LwRc

Anyway, thanks to Al for reminding me to stop by and say hello, I know we are all so busy today.

One more thing that is somewhat entertaining is a real time page that shows activity of folks coming off and on the blog with links too, some old posts that maybe are not otherwise seen show up with Google searches here, shoot I've even used it as a reference too!

http://live.feedjit.com/live/ducknetweb.blogspot.com/

Thanks again and I hope this was ok just to stop in again!