There is little doubt that the days of printed medical records are numbered, but according to a report from the Huffington Post Investigative Fund and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, the transition from paper to paperless is producing mixed results:

Federal officials expect to spend as much as $45 billion in economic stimulus funds over the next ten years to encourage doctors and hospitals to buy electronic records systems. The aim is to improve health care, tame spending and minimize medical mistakes.

Though it enjoys wide-reaching political support in Washington, the drive has generated less enthusiasm in the medical trenches. Many doctors and technology analysts warn that electronic records systems now on the market may constitute a risky investment for taxpayers. Early reports from some American and European hospitals, they say, suggest that some technology may prove unreliable and could even pose safety problems for patients.

“Our basic position is that the current products cannot meet our quality, safety or efficiency needs,” said Kendall Rogers, an internist at the University of New Mexico. He chairs an information technology task force for the Society of Hospital Medicine, a doctors’ group whose members work primarily in hospitals.

No government agency regulates digital health systems or tracks how well they work. There is no central repository for reporting problems, though a relatively small number of voluntary reports to the Food and Drug Administration hint at the range of breakdowns faced by some hospitals and doctors.

Some technology analysts also have criticized provisions in some sales contracts that may prohibit buyers of digital records software from publicly disclosing any flaws.

The report notes that the benefits of going to paperless medical records will revolutionize health care, making all the efforts by the technology providers to overcome the obstacles worthwhile.

Digitizing the records could “help foil medical mistakes stemming from sloppy doctor handwriting on prescription pads and save money from tests and X-rays that must be repeated when paper records can’t be located.”

And:

Beyond simply storing written medical findings, the software is expected to link doctors with hospitals and federal health data banks. Doctors would be able to send and receive medical test results online and automatically remind patients when it’s time for a check-up. Most systems have built-in alerts and alarms to warn doctors of dangerous drug interactions and boast other safety features to assist them in caring for patients.

And proponents predict that the ability to mine electronic data from millions of patients will yield clues about which medical treatments work the best, spot adverse drug reactions more quickly and speed up detection of infectious disease outbreaks.

Source: Huffington Post.