Robyn,

Thanks for your kind words.

Regarding your hope that someone in office will take a look, I think Joe above has a good idea in his plan to forward the idea to the folks in D.C. and to everyone on his email list.

I’m content to simply put my ideas up here on the blog, but I’m certainly not opposed to folks directing others here to have a look.

Cheers,

Sam

Thanks for the feedback.

If you read much of this blog, I think you will find that I am in no way the type of person who thinks that government has the best answers or that commercial enterprises should be shut out of the process.

The software system I talk about was actually developed for the government by the private sector. The feds have already spent billions of dollars developing this system.

In a perfect world, I’d have the government get out of the healthcare business almost entirely.

This is not my perfect world however. This is the real world and in this real world, we’ve just elected a President and Congress who seem hell bent on having a further takeover of the nations healthcare system by the government.

Part of their proposed actions involves mandating universal coverage and that all patients have electronic health records.

If they simply mandate this as a requirement of healthcare entities (doctors, hospitals, etc), they are essentially saying to them, “Hey guys, here’s this big mandate. You better get ready to cough up some dough to meet it.”

In spite of whatever studies you might wish to cite which show that in the long run these healthcare entities might save money by using electronic health records, there is still a huge up-front cost. By far, the biggest part of that up front cost is the actual software that commercial enterprises are currently offering on the market.

Naturally, this represents a huge hurdle to any such entity that might be thus affected by the mandate.

Contrary to popular belief, many hospitals, doctors, etc are currently operating on very thin margins, and in fact many are currently operating at a financial loss.

Such a huge unfunded mandate could be the final nail in the coffin for many of these entities.

Naturally, such a huge unfunded government mandate can expect to be met with resistance from the folks on its receiving end.

So, the natural inclination of the big government crowd will likely be to try and use a carrot and stick approach, offering punishments for those who don’t comply and perhaps offering tax incentives, grant funds, etc to encourage compliance.

Of course the commercial enterprises you mention all stand to benefit greatly from this (at the expense of the healthcare entities and the taxpayers).

What I am proposing is that rather than offer silly tax incentives or bureaucracy heavy grants, etc as the carrot, why not simply offer for free download, the software that currently exists, already works and has already been paid for by the taxpayers?

Ultimately, the rational used by the politicians to try and mandate use of electronic records is supposedly so that healthcare costs will go down and delivery will be safer and more efficient.

Why should the purpose of pushing for electronic healthcare records be subverted into some sort of corporate welfare program for software vendors?

As mentioned toward the end of my post, I am in agreement with you that the current corporate entities would certainly do everything in their power to stop my proposal. Naturally, they would love to have their coffers enriched, and my proposal would get in their way in this regard.

Again, use the Interstate Highways as a model for comparison. Should Eisenhower have simply scrapped the idea because of fear that commercial toll-road enterprises would stand to lose money and therefore lobby against a federal highway system?

And before somebody tries to say that my proposal is some sort of corporate welfare program for healthcare entities, I say bullocks. Even with the software for free, this will cost plenty of money, time and aggravation for any and all hospitals, doctors, etc that are forced to adopt this software to replace whatever medical records systems they are currently using.

It will be a giant pain in their ass and in their wallets. Offering a standardized already existing software package for free download would at least soften that blow somewhat. It would also soften the blow to the already strapped taxpayers since this is an electronic health records system that they have already paid several billion dollars for, rather than forcing them to spend billions more for some other system or systems to be developed and implemented.

Again, thanks for the input.

And thanks to StanR for directing you this way.