U.S. Hospital 2.0
Hospitals Aren’t What They Used To Be 
Most hospitals in San Diego County and across the country are now using some sort of electronic medical records system – a technological leap proven to reduce medical errors and one that many think is key to slowing runaway health care costs. For nearly two decades, physicians, health experts and even U.S. presidents have declared the nation within reach of the holy grail of medical information technology: a vast computerized network linking hospitals, doctors’ offices, pharmacies, laboratories, clinics and insurers that would allow a patient’s comprehensive medical record to accompany him around the nation’s fractured health care system.Creating this system has proven much more difficult and costly than anyone predicted:
- The health care and software industries have been slow to adopt technical standards that are needed to allow different computer systems to talk to each other.
- Some health care providers, particularly doctors, have been reluctant to invest heavily in new technology without assurances that they will reap the financial savings created by the investment.
- And the legal mandate to protect patients’ privacy remains a vexing challenge for those creating systems designed to share information.
Kaiser Permanente is in the midst of rolling out the nation’s biggest electronic medical records system. Once fully deployed in 2010, KP HealthConnect will cover Kaiser’s 8.4 million members, 32 hospitals and 431 medical offices in California and six other states. The project, estimated to cost more than $3.2 billion, has encountered numerous problems that included a four-year delay. Physicians are moving from an intuitive way of practicing medicine, in which they treat a patient based on their own knowledge and experience, to so-called evidence-based medicine guided largely by mountains of data analyzed for patterns and trends.
