Should the "free market" create Electronic Medical Records?

"Should the "free market" create Electronic Medical Records?"

Sure. I have worked in the medical industry and the tediousness of the paperwork is just mind boggling. Companies have to hire alot of additional staff just to handle paperwork, they have to hire contractors to store or destroy the paperwork. They pass the cost of this onto the consumer. If the consumer can save money on medical expenses then they can use that money towards something else, like maybe ice cream from the local dairy farm and maybe that farm can stay in business or hire more hands. The point is that electronic medical records can help the medical industry save money and hopefully pass those savings onto the patient. But if the government gets involved then they will totally ruin the efficiency and the regulation would probably put a bigger burden on smaller medical companies that can't afford to quickly switch to the new system.

YEA, EMR's are the wave of the future, but why ? They are only going to provide more unemployment & excess efficiency, which has brought us to TODAY..We need human "stimulation" not unhuman stimulation that machines have brought ..Control is data base , control is centralization, control is getting rid of so called waste, control places more into the hands of a few...Machines have made this possible... In theory it all is wonderfull ..It has now become our undoing ..We can out produce ourselves & those who would control , now have the capabillity they lacked years ago ..They have traded off human hands for machine hands.. This centeralizes the power to a few who get to designate what is sustainable & who is sustainable...
Agenda 21..And I am not against Technology , but am for the correct & appropriate use of Technology ..Perversions have brought us to this point in human history...Humankind is about to be userped by the USERPER..
Did you ever hear of a snake in the grass ? Yes he has come down out of the tree...Seeking whom he may devour...
Good people do Good deeds
Good people make it happen

"some type of universal "standard" is inevitable."

Yes. Define the XML schema and publish it.

"while there may be a bunch of EMR software vendors today, very soon there will only be one or two. (Think Microsoft/ Apple or internet browsers.)"

That is a big assumption.

"Does it make any sense for many software vendors to create multiple proprietary (and incompatible) systems and then let them fight to the death in the marketplace"

That is a free market.

"Isn't this horribly inefficient?"

Free markets are about freedom, not necessarily about efficiency.

"What about the poor schmuck hospital that ends up buying software for millions of dollars only to be forced into dumping it later and purchasing the new "standard", ie market winner?"

In a free market, there is no forcing.

product of that expenditure should belong to the public. I don't think I'd have any difficulty with the VA turning over software to individuals or companies who, I presume, are already aware that they will also have to employ MUMPS in order to use it. I don't think having the government develop anything is efficient. The availability of Vista doesn't seem to have kept independent developers from writing and publishing various software products that form, interpret and exchange electronic patient information. There's quite a few of them around. The "fight to the death" scenario you propose is not exactly new to a competitive marketplace, nor is it bad. This struggle goes on every day among companies who publish competing products that adhere to such electronic document formatting/exchange standards.

As to the "multiple proprietary (and incompatible) systems", while the internal operations and structure of a given software product is certainly going to be proprietary, the methods employed in the formatting, interpretation and exchange of electronic formats (under say a general heading of ANSI-837) are not proprietary in and of themselves. This is after all one of the alleged purposes of establishing a public standard by which all vendors are informed as to the nature of information, used as input for their software product, as well as required structures and content to be present in any information produced as output by a given software product. The documents describing them are available from many sources, both public and private, and those standards represent the common basis for information exchange between whatever software products are applied in a given commercial healthcare environment.
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