Recent disasters highlight the need for electronic health records
Alexander Tingey
Issue date: 9/29/05 Section: Health
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Hurricane Katrina has left Louisiana and its party haven New Orleans in a state of emergency. The current health risks in the disaster area include uninhabitable lands due to raw sewage and buildings covered in mold growth. However it is not only the current state of the area that endangers former residents. Soggy piles of paper may be all that remain of patient's records in these devastated areas.
"This is a tragedy on so many different levels, and it's really a tragedy for our healthcare system. Here's a healthcare system where records are stored the way they were stored 100 years ago. It's an embarrassment," said Harvard's Daniel Z. Sands, M D., a board member of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Currently the overwhelming majority of doctors use hard copy records as a way of tracking patients over the years. The loss of these files compounds the problem for overwhelmed hospitals treating these anonymous victims of the hurricanes.
In the future more and more doctors should be switching to electronic files to chart patient's progress. To be clear, the physical machines that the data is stored on are more vulnerable than hard copies to inclement weather. However the data that is stored in the machines can easily, and inexpensively, stored far out of harm's way.
"Clearly, if records were stored appropriately and backed up on electronic media, this information would still be available. We wouldn't have people trying to guess what their medications are or trying to figure out what kind of chemo they're getting or what phase of chemo they're in," said Dr. Sands in an interview this week.
"In the retail sector and in banking, that's a standard," said C. Martin Harris, M.D., M.B.A., chief information officer at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, in an interview. "In healthcare, as more and more people adopt electronic records, they are recognizing the need for having extensive disaster recovery plans."
Even without a disaster it is easy to see how electronic storage of patient's data could stand to benefit everyone. For example, when patients move from city to city, or go on vacation there files could easily be brought up at any point. At Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center patients can log onto the hospital's secure website and access their own files from the comfort of their home computer. This serves to help clinicians and patients alike as the information pertinent to each other is available anywhere.
Meanwhile, the National Institution of Health, along with other major medical societies, are working hard to ensure that patients displaced by the hurricanes are given the appropriate treatment.
In the future federal agencies are hoping to establish a national prescription medication database to ease the pressure put on disaster areas. Currently individual chains of pharmacies keep some electronic records of medications; however these are often on file for a mere 90 days.
Besides all the tragedy that followed Katrina there are some bright spots. For example, the New Orleans VA Medical Center flooded, however their electronic medical records covering over 50,000 patients of that hospital and surrounding veterans' outpatient clinics survived.
"This is a tragedy on so many different levels, and it's really a tragedy for our healthcare system. Here's a healthcare system where records are stored the way they were stored 100 years ago. It's an embarrassment," said Harvard's Daniel Z. Sands, M D., a board member of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Currently the overwhelming majority of doctors use hard copy records as a way of tracking patients over the years. The loss of these files compounds the problem for overwhelmed hospitals treating these anonymous victims of the hurricanes.
In the future more and more doctors should be switching to electronic files to chart patient's progress. To be clear, the physical machines that the data is stored on are more vulnerable than hard copies to inclement weather. However the data that is stored in the machines can easily, and inexpensively, stored far out of harm's way.
"Clearly, if records were stored appropriately and backed up on electronic media, this information would still be available. We wouldn't have people trying to guess what their medications are or trying to figure out what kind of chemo they're getting or what phase of chemo they're in," said Dr. Sands in an interview this week.
"In the retail sector and in banking, that's a standard," said C. Martin Harris, M.D., M.B.A., chief information officer at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, in an interview. "In healthcare, as more and more people adopt electronic records, they are recognizing the need for having extensive disaster recovery plans."
Even without a disaster it is easy to see how electronic storage of patient's data could stand to benefit everyone. For example, when patients move from city to city, or go on vacation there files could easily be brought up at any point. At Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center patients can log onto the hospital's secure website and access their own files from the comfort of their home computer. This serves to help clinicians and patients alike as the information pertinent to each other is available anywhere.
Meanwhile, the National Institution of Health, along with other major medical societies, are working hard to ensure that patients displaced by the hurricanes are given the appropriate treatment.
In the future federal agencies are hoping to establish a national prescription medication database to ease the pressure put on disaster areas. Currently individual chains of pharmacies keep some electronic records of medications; however these are often on file for a mere 90 days.
Besides all the tragedy that followed Katrina there are some bright spots. For example, the New Orleans VA Medical Center flooded, however their electronic medical records covering over 50,000 patients of that hospital and surrounding veterans' outpatient clinics survived.