Word: emres
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lucky insiders who sell the computers, software and support. Aside from their costs to us, electronic records are time-consuming - a constant distraction from patient care. They also put doctors on a slippery ethical slope; it's pretty easy to bill more for the same services with a good EMR program. They are a dangerous weed being advertised as fertilizer...
...Obama administration thinks it has discovered a magic bullet in the drive to lower health-care costs: electronic medical records (EMR). Getting the medical profession to switch from manual record-keeping to a national computerized system, boosters argue, will save money, reduce errors, improve quality and transform health care as we know it. President Barack Obama has proposed investing $50 billion over the next five years to help make it happen...
...EMR is being pushed hardest by those who would profit financially from it - not just technology companies but also large hospitals and medical practices hoping to improve billing and control internal costs. With a digital chart, every test, diagnosis and treatment a doctor orders is instantly passed along to the billing side: Why give away that Ace bandage for free? This could make the billing bureaucracy more efficient. But communication the other way, from billing to medical, would take place too. And this is more insidious. In a digital system, doctors can't simply write whatever they want: they generally...
...knee operation will run a fever for a while afterward. No one really knows why. But if a computer picks up the temperature elevation, it could prompt doctors to record a "fever of unknown origin" - a diagnosis that often triggers a bigger payment. EMR can inject more higher-paying codes into our patient contact, squeezing that much more money out of it, and quite innocently too. It is, after all, a computer forcing these choices. (See the most common hospital mishaps...
...President on down seem to believe computerized medicine will help contain costs rather than inflate them? One argument is that having all that information available should make for better medicine and better medicine will be cheaper in the long run. But more information can also lead to less medicine. EMR can greatly increase insurance-company denials of the treatments doctors want. Might this eliminate unnecessary testing? Sure. But who determines what is necessary? When a white-blood-cell count isn't high enough to "justify" hospitalization for IV antibiotics, the physician whose judgment says "this patient is sick and belongs...