I see many news articles and scientific publications pass by every day. And sometimes you come across an article that makes you think that it is not only right to the point, it is also showing you the way. This article that I want to mention now was also a reminder and an eye opener as it just once more made it clear to me what I have known for years, over 3 years ago it was a major aspect of a Worldbank presentation at the WHO at which I had the honour to participate, the immense importance of mobile phones and the fact that they will be the most important asset in the development of (health)care in developing countries.
As a means of increasing reach and enabling remote communities to explore new means of empowering individuals and groups, the mobile phone looks like a far better bet than the PC at this stage.
It is a must read: The perfect device for the developing world is not the PC.
(BTW, I’m convinced that also in our parts of the world the PC will loose it’s leading role to cell phones and very probably TV.)
And sometimes you see an article that wants you to give an award for the most short-sighted view on how to deal with the costs of the implementation of EHRs (not only in the USA, it is a problem in any country):
Establishing a 10-year national retention policy will immediately reduce the 500 million hard copy records by 35 percent and will shorten the cost to transition from the paper- and film-based record to only 10 years. Simply adopting a 10-year national retention policy will reduce storage and transition costs up to $11 billion over a 10-year period.
Ed Santangelo in: Modernizing Electronic Health Records Key to Unlocking Industry Efficiencies
One of the essential aspects of an EHR is the construction of a medical history that will be of immense benefit to the patient, the careprovider but in the longer run also to the future generations. Developments in genomics, and therefore personalized medicine, will lean heavily on family histories, which will be, certainly in the beginning years, mainly of an “observatory” nature. Throwing away our actual medical history only to cut the costs of installing an innovative system with immense positive implications for our medical and health future is just plain stupid.
Lodewijk Bos
