Posted on 05/16/2009 8:08:50 AM PDT by La Lydia
When President Obama won approval for his $787 billion stimulus package in February, large sections of the 407-page bill focused on a push for new technology that would not stimulate the economy for years. The inclusion of as much as $36.5 billion in spending to create a nationwide network of electronic health records fulfilled one of Obama's key campaign promises -- to launch the reform of America's costly health-care system. But it was more than a political victory for the new administration. It also represented a triumph for an influential trade group whose members now stand to gain billions in taxpayer dollars.
A Post review found that the trade group, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, had worked closely with technology vendors, researchers and other allies in a sophisticated, decade-long campaign to shape public opinion and win over Washington's political machinery.
With financial backing from the industry, they started advocacy groups, generated research to show the potential for massive savings and met routinely with lawmakers and other government officials. Their proposals made little headway in Congress, in part because of the complexity of the issues and questions about whether the technology and federal subsidies would work as billed....
Their sudden success shows how the economic crisis created a remarkable opening for a political and financial windfall...
Such an approach would rely on unprecedented data-mining into medical records and the practices of doctors, a kind of surveillance that also would enable insurers to cut costs by controlling more precisely the care that patients receive...Some observers said the projected savings are overly optimistic and that launching such vast computer networks under tight deadlines is risky, a lesson learned by the Bush administration when it botched a variety of homeland security systems rushed into place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Who do you suppose got Congress to pass the bill mandating compact fluorescent bulbs? Who benefits from that?
While the records' privacy is well guarded, there is no guarantee that data could not be obtained from the system that will be used by payors/government for nefarious purposes.
It all boils down to whether one trusts the keepers of the information, the payors, and the government. That takes more trust than most Americans have.
exactly.
Digitizing records (which is all this is) is not health care “reform.”
It’s an ancillary business that is very expensive (personal experience with it) and will only occasionally increase the quality of health care.
$17 billion in stimulus money going right out of the country.
The only benefit I see to this is if they connect it with voter rolls and remove all the dead people.
I did subcontract controls design at GE Medical for their MRIs etc, years ago.
Overall the *type* of employee GE recruited I had to work beside were enough to make my skin literally crawl.
I finished my contract with GE in record time, hit the door and never looked back.
To this very day when[ever] I see a piece of GE Med equipment in a clinic I'm to receive care? I have to restrain myself from demanding something --anything-- else.
"Their sudden success shows how the economic crisis created a remarkable opening for a political and financial windfall..."
HA!!
Well, appears someone at the disgusting WP rag heard Rahm Emmanuel. LOL
“The biggest winner of all is IBM. But Americans won’t benefit at all, because IBM just laid off 18,000 Americans and are replacing them with 12,000 Indians to process Eelectronic Medical Records (EMRs).
$17 billion in stimulus money going right out of the country”
Could you explain how IBM is the big winner?
As a member of HIMSS and a small business owner in the field, I am not a fan of the healthcare automation incentive in the stimulus bill. It will make automation more expensive and cause bigger support problems for those that want to automate records. It will force those that don’t want, or need to automate to waste resources. In addition, they will probably screw up the standards we currently follow and create a new set. Just like HIPAA and the ANSI standards.
Every year physicians fight for the prevention of billions of payment cuts. Now, we have to advise our physician clients to try to take whatever money they can get, including a federal bonus for spending money on computers. Just like PQRI and e-scripts.
This is Medicare-driven, so it will affect mostly practices that treat seniors. If you don’t have a Medicare practice, good luck getting in line to automate your records.
Just wait until the gigantic national health care database decides you are dead.
” I’m sorry but our records show you died and are therefor not eligible for service in the National Health System. Have a nice day.”
Check this out. See referenced post. I couldn’t get it any larger than a clickable thumbnail, though.
Digitizing records so they can mine the records for what they will then determine is cost effective establishing what they will pay for and what they won’t pay for.
Who did the members of this group give to? My bet they gave big bucks to elect Obama and Democrats in the last 2 election cycles at least.
Apparently the first thing they did was buy and pay for Tom Daschle. And according to the article, “Corporate members include government contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, health-care technology giants such as McKesson, Ingenix and GE Healthcare, and drug industry leaders, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.”
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