Really ?

I spent way too much time completing the surgical center’s pre-op online patient information prior to recent shoulder surgery… pages! All that information is available at my surgeons’ office and my family doc’s office, in the same city. But it is not about proximity. If the medical community would step into the tech age for record keeping and sharing, all those records, care, procedures, medications, etc., would be available to the medical community at large, without the duplicate records and paperwork. It is absurd.

I complained about this to the surgical center to no avail. I registered a complaint in my surgeon’s office and their answer was the office and the surgical centers are not related facilities.

When the hell is the medical profession going to get real about central records on global servers? That argument about proprietary / confidentiality does not stand. Just look at global transactions made and information storage used by business and industry and banking and their customers, and suppliers across the web. Do those businesses get hacked? It happens. Do they recover, yes! Do they abandon global record keeping, transactions, and interfaces? No! They just get better at security!

And think of the advantages for the patient and physician:

A lot less paperwork in doc’s office.
New doc’s would know the patient’s entire medical history.
That history could be updated as necessary following patient visits and procedures.
Doc’s could see a patient’s script history before prescribing new/additional drugs.
Few patients show up with a complete memory of all procedures, exams, drugs, allergic reactions, etc. No need to know that, the information is in a data base.
I’m sure the medical and information technology community could add many more bullets to the above list.