Despite the slow adoption, this site fully agrees that it is inevitable that online medicine, in all forms, is going to bloom over the next decade. There are simply too many factors at play to keep he use of health IT at bay for much longer.  Cost issues are one, but the costs associated with failure of adoption far outweigh the costs of implementation.  Along with the fundamental technical issues of implementation and adoption, an array of professional, social and privacy issues must be addressed.  For example, the current licensing system for physicians needs amending so that physicians can “practice” medicine freely on the web, across state lines.  This may include some form of national licensing or at least some form of national reciprocity between all state licensing boards.   Additionally, there needs to be more direct linkage between patients and providers via the internet since many, many times, the real need of patients is for communication and information, not necessarily face to face encounters.  This will entail some form of e-commerce solution (all of which have already been fully worked out in the retail sector of the economy) as well as insurance coverage at some level.  Health IT’s time is now.  We are ready to contribute with REAL solutions for continued REAL HEALTH REFORM . . . obj jo and jomaxx

Small percentage of Americans have personal health records.

Although online personal health records — controlled by patients themselves…have been available for years, only a small percentage of Americans have them today. One reason for the low rate of adoption is that typing one’s personal health information into an online form is time-consuming, mind-numbing, and error-prone. In an effort to overcome that challenge, Microsoft and Google have announced partnerships in recent months with large healthcare providers…to explore transferring patient data automatically into personal health records. In addition, the Obama administration plans to spend $19 billion over the next few years to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records in doctors’ offices and hospitals. Experts note that personal health records…hold considerable promise, but much depends on how complete the information is in them.

Healthcare IT seen as making progress toward mainstream implementation.

There are innovators, intriguing experiments and lots of interest, yet healthcare IT has not gone mainstream. Still, the direction is clear, and only the pace of the shift is in question. The Obama administration’s plan to spend $19 billion to hasten the adoption of electronic health records will give “more impetus to the shift toward Internet-style computing. And there is plenty of evidence of the emerging transition being demonstrated and announced this week at the health information technology’s big annual conference and trade show in Chicago, sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Some examples that progress is commencing, including a joint project, announced on Sunday, between the CDC and GE Healthcare to deliver individually tailored public health alerts to electronic health records in doctors’ offices and a Mayo Clinic and IBM collaboration on a website for searching records and data stores of all kinds in medicine.

A Hospital Is Offering Digital Records – read @ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/companies/06health.html?_r=2&ref=health

Health Care Industry Moves Slowly Onto the Internet – read @ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/health-care-industry-moves-slowly-onto-the-internet/

Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) – read @ http://www.himss.org/ASP/index.asp