"The emergency room scenario is freighted with emotion, unstated expectations, time criticality, life-and-death decisions at their most extreme. It might be politically exciting to announce, but in practice a new system will only add to the load on THE most adrenalin-pumped, overworked, pressured and tired health professionals in the business. And being new it will probably let them down. It is NOT a good candidate for a first excursion into a workable health record :-) "
Maybe you should go talk to an ED doctor. As a matter of fact, a fair amount of time is lost in EDs trying to deduce information that would be in the current version of the health record, like preexisting conditions and drugs the patient is currently taking. (Or the absence of comorbidities.) This loss time will result harm and death both for the patients themselves and coincidentally to the other people they could be treating. Obviously, if you're are a 20 year old who has slammed into tree while mountain biking you probably don't have anything significant in a health record. However, if you are an 85 year old female you probably do. When you are dragged into ED the people treating you want to know your history and they will put a fair bit of time and effort into finding out. When you go back to your GP she will want to know what happened, whether there were any diagnoses and importantly what ongoing drug etc treatments you have been given that they need to take into account in your ongoing treatment. Do you care about these frequent flyers (the big health care users) or or do you only care about yourself or your kind of people? Younger males are typically less concerned about their health and way more likely to be attracted to libertarian arguments. Apparently testosterone related. Have you noticed? What beats me about this current moral panic is the uninformed flippant denial of the big positives of the shared health record. It's like listening global warming deniers arguing that there are too many cold mornings. It all about you, is it? This sort of government initiative, eg, mandatory seat belts, anti-smoking, etc - has a long history of people obsessing about what are actually quite minor risks and inconveniences compared to being incapacitated or dead. Personally, I'm quite happy to put up with a small risk of my health care information being hacked, if it improves my health outcomes, or even (get this!) if it improves the health outcomes for someone's 85 year old granny who I don't even know. Or even if it contributes to the health care of people I don't know who aren't born yet. Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
