Two trillion dollars and 46 million people – two shameful metrics that document how much Americans spend on health care and the number of people still without it. Since 2000, more than 8 million Americans have joined the ranks of the uninsured. And the cost of providing health care and treating those who grow sick without basic healthcare continues to rise.
That’s why one of the brightest parts of a luminous week was that action taken by President Barack Obama and Congress to expand healthcare coverage to more than four million children.
That’s a giant step in the right direction.
Now it is time to take another leap by addressing on one of the most vexing problems in the American healthcare system – outdated and inefficient technology.
Currently, only 8% of country’s 5,000 hospitals use some form of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and about 17% of 800,000 physicians. Think about those statistics. Most physicians and hospitals are still using the technology of the 1950’s. The giant wall of records that decorates every doctor’s office you have been in since you were little – that’s our country’s basic medical records system today.
It’s long past time to bring healthcare information technology into the 21st century and it is the key to providing better care and being able to afford to cover more families.
In order to dramatically reduce cost and expand coverage we need to make health records standardized and electronic.
President Obama has called for all health records to be standardized and online within five years. In San Francisco we are moving forward to create our own privacy-protected EMR in 2009. We understand that EMRs are critical to reducing expenses and expanding our universal health care program, Healthy San Francisco. We now have 34,906 San Franciscans enrolled (as of 1/26/09), almost half way to our goal of universal coverage.
San Francisco is still the only city in America to tackle the healthcare crisis with such a bold plan. This has made us a laboratory for change – and one of the important lessons we can already report is just how important basic technological reform will be to the eventual goal of Universal Health Care for all Americans.
I want to commend House and Senate leaders for including funding to jump start an investment in health information technology in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The $2 billion included in the House proposal will support the infrastructure necessary to implement a national model to promote the electronic exchange and use of health information technology.
Once implemented, a sound health information technology infrastructure will become a catalyst for improved health care quality and the reduction of sky-rocketing health care costs nationwide.
On my Green 960 radio show this past week I had the same conversation that I imagine the President and his advisors are also having about digitizing all medical records. My guests were Electronic Medical Records expert, Timi Leslie and Brett Johnson, CEO of One Med Place.
Please listen to the radio show podcast for yourself about the challenges and the necessity of Electronic Medical Records.
There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, from interoperability to getting doctors to adopt the technology. But if we are going to have real change on health care, we need to keep tackling and solving the tough problems like Electronic Medical Records.
Listen to Mayor Newsom’s radio show online or subscribe to his weekly policy discussions on iTunes. This week’s guest is the co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams. Stay in touch with Mayor Newsom by joining him on Facebook. You can also follow him on Twitter.