President George W. Bush set a bold goal for our medical system: create a digital medical record for every American by 2014. The Obama administration raised the stakes this year by pressing for billions of dollars in stimulus funding to jumpstart adoption. Under the plan, doctors will be able to apply for $44,000 in extra Medicare payments if they purchase digital systems and make “meaningful use” of them. Hospitals can receive millions of dollars from the same program.
This nationwide system of computerized medical records will cost nearly $100 billion, but there’s broad agreement on the value: if 90% of hospitals go digital, it will save $77 billion a year in healthcare costs as well as create new jobs and prevent deadly medical errors.
Sounds like an ideal system. The problem: Almost one third of Americans may not be able to access their own records.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Commerce released their latest benchmark data on internet use.
The internet may be important to American life, but its use is far from universal.
Over 30 percent of households do not use the Internet at home, and 30 percent of all persons (not households) don’t use the internet anywhere. The top two reasons? They can’t afford it and don’t care about it.
People who don’t use the internet are more likely to be low income, seniors, minorities, the less-educated, and rural Americans.
To prevent widening the gap in access to the best-quality healthcare, the first step may not be digital medical records, but universal internet access. More access means greater transparency in record keeping, more ability to add to our own medical files and an increased number of digital encounters (email, video chat, etc.) to supplement office visits.
A debate has recently started on just how we’ll get there.
