Cold and Flu Seaon

Emergency rooms all over the U.S. are being packed with flu victims. It appears there are a couple different strains making the rounds. There's the old standby fever, chills, dry cough, upper respiratory breed. That can be fatal. Then there's the norovirus which blesses it's victims with a day or so of vomiting and/or diarrhea. They wish it was fatal. No such luck. You just get to suffer.

Turns out it's virus season for computers, too. Our network went down one day this week. Kind of an interesting problem when lab, X-ray, patient records, and phone systems are all provided from the same server.

Fortunately, our hospital has a Plan B and that worked well enough to allow care to continue uninterrupted even if slightly inconvenient. The event reminded me of two of the elements of electronic health records that really give me pause.

First, I had the pleasure of jotting down my patient progress notes on paper. Quick. Concise. But relatively worthless to a government or insurance agency that wants to look over my shoulder and determine whether the care provided qualifies for any part of the bill submitted. From my perspective, electronic health records have it only half right: They have real value in checking to insure medications and allergies are recognized and not overlooked. What they offer otherwise is simply a billing tool, a method of insuring every i is dotted and t is crossed in pursuit of maximum reimbursement. Well, they're that and a bonanza for the software developers.

The second element for concern is security. Computer security is like the safe storage of nuclear waste. It's an oxymoron. All one hear's is how much the quality and safety of patient care will improve with the electronic record. Maybe. Definitely true in some respects. But in others computer security possess a substantial risk. The best efforts to shore up those defenses will always be the target for the clever, the curious, and the criminal. And, as long as humans are creating that cloak of security, humans will be working to devise ways to take an uninvited peek beneath the cloak. It's hard for me to imagine there will ever be a day when a person can park their personal information, whether financial or medical, on the world wide web without concern.