I know - I sound like a dork running for office... but I have a great idea. Well, I'm sure it's not my very own idea. As a matter of fact I think I read about this a handful of years ago in a mag...
So, if you're reading my blog then you're a close enough friend to know about my car accident as a toddler. If you don't know me and happened upon this blog by accident, let me clarify... I was not driving a car as a toddler and got in an accident. Rather, I was involved in a terrible car accident when I was 22 months old. Hope that clears things up a bit.
Now that we have that settled.... I've been having more headaches and mentioned to my doctor here that I have copies of CT scans, reports, etc... She asked to get copies because that would be great to be ablet o compare the scans from 2000/2001 to now and to be able to read the reports from the surgery I had at that time.
No problem, I said. I've got it all at home. But apparently I lied because I can't find them. As I started looking I remembered that I had given everything to a doctor I saw at the Cleveland Clinic in 2003. Did I make copies of the reports? of course not. Did I make copies of the CD's? actually, I couldn't do that anyway...
So I've been on the phone all of lunch calling my old ENT, the hospital, the imaging center, to get copies of reports and disks. Pain in the ass.
So then, why can't all of our medical info, reports, imaging, tests, etc... all be centralized?? Especially in this day and age people are moving all around. Keeping track of all that is quite a task for someone with my medical background. Plus, I couldn't even make copies of the CD's of the CT scans anyway. What if I were in a major accident and they could easily save my life if only they could pull up that CT scan from last year??? Well, that's assuming they'd even know I had a CT scan a year ago since it wouldn't be in their system...
If computers are/ have been supposed to turn us into digital beings then why is the medical industry lacking so far behind??? If I remember correctly in the article I read about this, one issue stopping a "centralized medical database" was issues of privacy and the issues surrounding keeping that info safe from hackers, etc...
Now if I had any computer skills whatsoever at all I'd be going out, solving this problem and making myself millions. But since I don't can someone out there please develop this?? and soon!!!
1 comment:
Yes, it is a great idea. No, you're not the first to think it. Some hospital systems, such as Kaiser Permanente, utilize the same system in every hospital and every record is available from every office linked to their system.
Now, on to the problems. A)Computers get hacked all the time. Some people really don't want their sensitive medical info to be divulged. B) Computer systems crash. They are backed up on ginormous mainframes, but still sometimes a bug will corrupt an entire system.
You have to sign a HIPPA statement (Health Information Privacy Protection Act) that declares you understand that there are only a very limited few people entitled to your info without your written authorization. This carries through your medical care to include the fact that if you call a hospital, they are not allowed to tell you if someone is a patient there if they don't want you to know. If your friends call to check on you after a procedure, the nurse can only say general statements like, "She's doing fine," but can't give any specific information.
Until computers become even harder to hack, we won't see a nationalized system.
The end.
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