I was reading the transcripts of the Senate subcommittee on Technology and the Law Committee on the Judiciary on the topic of High-Tech privacy issues in Health Care. While the transcript itself is over 100 pages long, comprising of numerous submissions from lawmakers and experts that were called to testify, at the outset there was a reference to HealthCard – something that seems to have been a pre-cursor of the PHRs that we see today.
The HealthCard was the size of a credit card, and could contain 2000 bytes (yes, bytes) of data that was supposed to have all of a patient’s medical history that could be carried around by the patient, edited by the next provider and the records of the primary physician would be updated at the next visit.
Care coordination, drug-drug interaction checks, alerts for missing preventive tests, segmentation of the practice patients by conditions and holding special clinics for major conditions – all of these were mentioned about in the testimony of Dr. Sherman Hope – a primary care doctor from Brownfield, TX.
Dr. Hope was 61 years old at the time of the hearing, and it was truly early days of practice computerization and EHRs – so he, along with his doctor son – Dr. Richard Hope created their own system – called SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan).
I will write more about it in my next post, but reading the testimony, the concepts driving the usage, the touted benefits and the privacy concerns raised about the technology made me think how little things have changed. We still talk about the same issues, same benefits, same issues even now. Just that the hearing took place in October, 1993.
It is clear that we have been down the pike many times before. How do we make sure that this time we move the needle on EHR adaption.
healthecosystem 