Something tells me you've never bothered making a software program in your life.

A hospital is a very complex facility that relies on many, many networks to perform their tasks. Writing code is the easy part. Implementing it on a scale that spans hundreds of doctors, nurses, and other staff for thousands of patients is a much larger task than you are giving it credit for.

Networks would need established to ensure compatability between one hospital and the next, one doctor and the next. Security is a paramount issue, so you have to establish confidentiality and proper clearances for such a service - again, that takes time & money...A lot of it.

Heck, having worked at a police station - which are much smaller and need the tech - I can tell you that they are incredibly backwards. I worked at the police station that was #1 in the entire nation for technology intergration & testing, and a vast majority of what was being done was still being done by hand, on paper. It takes time to build the programs...Trust me. Both working for the government, and working for a game company, it takes time to develop and test the system to get them to a level that they'd be able to be robustly implemented in the entire healthcare field.

Government needs to lower taxes if they are going to reduce their retarded spending habits that are bankrupting our nation. Tax reduction & spending reduction needs to go hand in hand.

The problem I have with your position is that the government shouldn't just hand out money to every project that'll return an investment to someone. If that was the case, then everyone would get a handout, and taxes would increase in the long run, and not decrease. We need solutions, but we need solutions from people, not politicians.

If you want to give out grants, stimulate research, and the like, why can't the public create NPOs to fund such development? It's not like the government does the best job when it comes to helping people...Organizations like the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, United Way, YMCA, Salvation Army, Mayo Clinic, American Cancer Society, and many more do a fantastic job of helping the kind of casues you just mentioned. But they do it without government meddling.

Of course, that's my political philosophy. If you want a more pervasive government that controls everything you do, and takes all you have to give it as they see fit, feel free to desire that. Of course, I do not want that kind of world. I want a world where private charities take care of people, not the govenrment.

This is what Kaiser does and they save a lot of money.
but they stilll charge as much as others.

that's great news! what can I do about it?

While I think that it is important for all forms of medical records to be switched over to a digital format, I don't think people realize how large of a project this will be and how rapidly it can turn into a gigantic boondoggle ... In the past I have heard of similar government inititives to create software solutions that have ended up costing hundreds of millions of dollars while producing broken and unfixable code.

Now, the one thing that really bothers me is the claim of $300,000,000,000 in savings each year ... If that was the case it would imply that somewhere around 2 to 3 Million people were employed simply managing healthcare files, and that roughly 2.5% of the total GDP of the United States was devoted to heathcare paperwork ...

Happy Squirrel - I think the issue is the economics of it.

If it would save a lot of money, and would also generate a lot of money for software sales....Why does the government need to get involved? This is a for-profit program, why does it need subsidy? Why does the government need to meddle?

This is an economic transaction, not a governmental one. I suspect that there's something in the system that we're not being told of truthfully.

I am 100% certain that if there was money involved in it, or there was demand from the healthcare field, there'd be entrepreneurs out there to capitalize on the situation. Since there is not (from what I've seen), there are 2 possibilities:

1) The savings really aren't as high as argued
2) Investors don't realize how much $$$ could be made in this

Under either possibility, it still shows that the government shouldn't throw away it's money to push someone on something else. Why can't the government save the $$$ and...You know....Try to pay down that multi-trillion dollar debt for once?

Realistically, only 10% of the problem would be implementing a system that is adequate for a particular hosptial regardless of how large it is ... Where the real complexity lies is that there are 50 states each with their own regulatory environment, thosands of hospitals and tens of thousands of healthcare facilities that each have their own operating practices, along with hundreds of insurance companies each with their own rules and regulations.

Even in Canada with our "Government" run healthcare, there has been a project by the government to integrate hospitals, clinics and pharmacies for well over a decade that has yet to be rolled out to a single institution because it is so complicated.

I am not against it, I am saying it's not really going to save the consumer any money, because the system is broken to begin with.

Healthcare needs reform in a bad way. If reform was done right 20 years ago, these systems would be great, and in place already.

The healthcare industry is the only one I know about where you have a third party. You have the doctor, patient, and then a third party telling doctors what they can charge, and what the patient can have done.

Changing that third party from a private company to the government does not fix the issue.

For example, if you has a system where there was no health insurance, and you had to pay for everything, cost would matter to you. If cost matters to you, you shop around. If your shopping around, healthcare providers have to be competitive, thus they all would have adopted this system a long time ago.

it's why the medical industry where health insurance is not a factor (like eye surgery and plastic surgery) have gotten better and cheeper over the years, and the one where insurance is, has gotten worse and more expensive.

How many Lasik eye surgery clinics use Paper? Probably none.

Mafoo -

This is why Medical Savings Accounts are a great idea for private and public usage. They circumvent the insurance issue, and give consumers the freedom to make choices on where to go, providing more competition.

And we all know how competition improves and makes the product more affordable.

They are also a lot cheaper to use. Most medical facilities give deep discounts to consumers if they pay in cash. I took my fiancee to an Urgent Care facility...They have 2 rates: Insurance rates and out of pocket rates. Since the transaction is instantaneous for cash, and there's local competition for Urgent Care facilities, they reduce the price by large percentages.