Free Republic

The federal government funneled billions in subsidies to software vendors who overstated or deceived the government about what their products could do, according to whistleblowers.(LYDIA ZURAW/KHN) This story also ran on Fortune. This story can be republished for free (details). Derek Lewis was working as an electronic health records specialist for the nation’s largest hospital chain when he heard about software defects that might even “kill a patient.” The doctors at Midwest (City) Regional Medical Center in Oklahoma worried that the software failed to track some drug prescriptions or dosages properly, posing a “huge safety concern,” Lewis said. Lewis cited...

The American Academy of Pediatrics board committed $583,000 in resources to establish the Clinical Health Information and Longitudinal Data Registry, AAP News Editor-in-Chief Anne Hegland wrote Nov. 21. To develop the CHILD Registry, the AAP will capture children's health data through EHRs, health payers and existing pediatric disease registries. The organization's goal for the project is to collect, store and analyze health data from all U.S. children, including information related to well-child and sick visits, chronic disease management and specialty care. The clinical data registry, which AAP officials plan to develop over the next five years, contributes to two of...

I rarely do follow-up columns. I’m averaging one every ten years. And while my last such exercise resulted in a written apology from the White House (for accusing me of making up facts over its removal of Churchill’s bust), today’s is not a complaint. It’s merely a recognition that the huge response elicited by last week’s column, “Why Doctors Quit,” warrants both rebuttal and clarification. Physicians who responded tended to agree with my claim that doctors are being driven out of the profession by the intrusions, interferences, regulations, mandates, constraints, and sundry other degradations of their vocation that are the...

<p>Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, a Philadelphia orthopedic surgeon, has a timely reminder for everyone encountering the federal health-care-exchange meltdown: “If you think signing up for Obamacare is a nightmare, ask your doctor how the EMR mandate is going.”</p> <p>Bingo.</p> <p>The White House finally acknowledged the spectacular public disaster of Obamacare’s Internet exchange infrastructure during Monday’s Rose Garden infomercial. But President ShamWow and his sales team are AWOL on the bureaucratic ravages of the federal electronic-medical-records mandate.</p>

Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation of whether Internal Revenue Service employees broke the law when they targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status — the latest setback for an agency that is the subject of withering bipartisan criticism and multiple congressional inquiries. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday that the Justice Department and the FBI began the probe after the IRS acknowledged that it selected conservative groups with the words “tea party” and “patriot” in their names for special reviews. “We are examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations,” Holder said at a news...

Here’s more evidence that government “cures” are inevitably worse than the “diseases” they seek to wipe out. Buried in the trillion-dollar stimulus law of 2009 was an electronic-medical-records “incentive” program. Like most of President Obama’s health-care rules, this top-down electronic record-sharing scheme is a big fat bust. Oversight is lax. Cronyism is rife. The job-killing and privacy-undermining consequences have only just begun. The program was originally sold as a cost-saving measure. In theory, modernizing record-collection is a good idea, and many private health-care providers have already made the change. But as with many government “incentive” programs, the EMR bribe is...

CurtMonash writes "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable. If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53857 Obama Announces Joint Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record By Donna Miles American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, April 9, 2009 – President Barack Obama announced plans today to create a joint virtual lifetime electronic record that will improve care and services to transitioning veterans by smoothing the flow of medical records between the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments. The concept, long advocated by officials in both departments, is considered a major step toward improving the delivery of care and services to servicemembers transitioning from military to civilian life. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and...

When federal agents searched the offices of Comprehensive Drug Testing in Long Beach, California, on April 8, 2004, they officially were looking for the records of 10 baseball players suspected of buying steroids from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), a sports nutrition center whose owners had been charged with illegal steroid distribution. They left with information that went far beyond what their warrant described, including data on 1,200 baseball players and almost 3,000 computer files unrelated to Major League Baseball drug testing.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit recently told the government it may keep these records...