Why Doctors Are Still Faxing after $30 Billion in Subsidies for Digital Records

Why Doctors Are Still Faxing after $30 Billion in Subsidies for Digital Records | Foundation for Economic Education:
An exposé in Mother Jones provides a fascinating look at how President Obama's "common sense" plan to digitalize medical records turned into an expensive fiasco.

After nearly $30 billion in stimulus money to subsidize electronic health records (EHR), many doctors think using computer software is more hassle than it's worth, and most are still faxing and mailing physical paper records. 

Something is deeply wrong here.

It turns out that having digital copies of records is only useful if they can be sent to other machines and read by them. 

And that is precisely what the stimulus failed to accomplish.

Instead, it spawned a mess of incompatible systems throughout the medical industry that couldn't easily communicate with each other. 

The government's digital health records plan created an electronic Tower of Babel in healthcare. 

Mother Jones singles out health software contractor Epic as a particular roadblock to progress, with crony connections to Obama administration that made it uniquely situated to scoop up the subsidies, but not necessarily to serve clients and patients. 

Epic was shovel ready for this stimulus windfall. 

Faulkner's company was one of the few software vendors back then offering an all-in-one package covering a hospital's record keeping needs. 

...Meanwhile, Faulkner — Epic's CEO and a major Democratic donor — landed a spot in 2009 on the Obama administration's Health IT Policy Committee, which helped shape the regulations guiding health care software and pushed to rapidly implement EHR in hospitals without first figuring out how to trade records between different systems.

...Fax, by contrast, is still free. 

And that is what hospitals and doctors are using.

...Eventually, kicking and screaming, the healthcare records industry will be dragged into the 21st century, but the government's crony regulations and subsidies haven't helped. 

And worse still, doctors' biggest paperwork burdens no longer come from patient records but from Obamacare — in some cases doubling doctors' administrative workloads..."