Electronic medical records were fervently promoted as a panacea to medical inefficiencies, medical errors, and cost.

The reality has been to date, anything but. The New York Times article, “In Second Look, Few Savings from Digital Health Records,” outlines some of the disappointments that the technology has delivered to date.

Clearly systems relying upon handwritten and typed notes and reports, repositories of paper, and lack of portability are not worthy of the future. Quality systems should be secure, interoperable on any platform via a common set of data standards, and should not permit meaningless content and boilerplate or inflation of fees and improper billing.

Given our ability to put a variety of data on the web, one must wonder why the move towards electronic medical records has been so disappointing to date and has failed to deliver as promised.

There is no turning back but we are still in version 1.0 it would appear. Perhaps Apple or Google should take it on? Could it be that because it is “medical” it has been made needlessly complicated?

MCNTalk thanks Richard Bensinger, MD for referring this article to us.