Digital Health Records
Get Much Needed Injection
But will the stimulus be enough to boost adoption of costly
electronic and personal health records? By Daniel Joelson
AS A PRACTICING internist at a county hospital, Charles Ken- nedy was troubled to find that even though
he had a very good idea of what he
was doing for his patients, he knew
little about what all the other caregiv-ers were doing for his patients. He
and the other parties involved did not
have the comprehensive, structured
data they needed to achieve optimal
results for the patient.
Despite vigorous attempts by vendors to peddle digital health care
technology for records storage, the
systems simply weren’t catching on.
“The reason most physicians have
not embraced electronic medical records (EMR) in the past is that they
haven’t found them that useful,” says
Kennedy, now VP of health IT at WellPoint Inc., an Indianapolis, Ind.-based
independent licensee of the Blue
Cross and Blue Shield Association.
However, this seems to be changing. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)
lifted the prospects of electronic
health records (EHRs)—or EMRs (as
they are often interchangeably
called)—and personal health records (PHRs), which have experi-
