Obama: we need EMRs; NAS report: be careful what you ask for

On the same day that we reported that an IT industry group was calling for stimulus money to go toward modernizing the electronic healthcare infrastructure, President-elect Obama delivered. In a speech in Washington, he called for providing electronic patient records throughout the country within the next five years. It's a lofty goal, and one with the potential to have significant real-world benefits; unfortunately, the following day, a report from the National Academies of Science suggested it's one we may not be ready to pursue, as a continuation of current practices runs the risk of harming our progress toward a modernized health care system. Ars has looked at Electronic Medical Records in detail, describing a host of problems that they are expected to fix. Obama touched on many of the same things in his speech: "To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America's medical records are computerized. This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests. But it just won't save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs—it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system." In an ideal world, EMR probably would. But anyone who has dealt with an insurance company's computerized billing system recently will undoubtedly attest to the fact that EMR is no panacea for errors and inefficiencies. And Obama's goal is hardly a new one. President Bush set roughly the same target date in rolling out an EMR initiative based on a series of regional efforts; the IT industry group report described the results as a series of small, incompatible systems run by companies without enough business to remain viable. It's clear that simply determining to go electronic will not necessarily provide all of the benefits outlined in Obama's speech.