This is where you call Dominoes Pizza and they tell you you cant have

Anchovy pizza because you retain water and you have a bad heart.

Would you like something more appropriate?????



Hmmm...just an observation but where are the people who used to ask every day "How has the government changed your life and taken away your rights?????

hmmmmm.....

The VA already has digital health records.
I can walk into any VA hospital in the US and they can pull up my medical records within a minute.

This was very handy a couple years ago when i walked into a VA hospital I had never been to before having a heart attack.

I got treated within minutes and they knew my medical history right there without having to try to get it from another hospital that may or may not want to give them the information.

Yes people have died because hospitals have refused to send medical records to other hospitals.

I worked as a EMT for many years and have had doctors that would not give me complete copies of my own medical records until i went to my county EMS director to force them to.

[edit on 22-2-2009 by ANNED]

This has some similarities to what's happening in England and Wales (not sure about Scotland or N.Ireland) regarding health records being centralised and becoming yet another 'Big Brother database'.

Some of the issue for us is that large-scale government IT projects are notoriously crap - to the point of being suspicious - given that these projects are tendered out to a small clique private firms and that no matter how many times these projects go tits-up, the same firms are hired again and again.

We have the extra issue of an aspect of health care being handed over to private firms, which isn't the issue it is in America.

Centralisation has so many potential problems due to 'creep'. One year, the government say only certain organisations have access to that centralised data, but in reality, this always gets expanded upon.

Also, centralisation is potentially problematic simply because so much is accessible in one place. How tempting is that for certain people?

You guys need to understand many entities already know a great deal about conditions, visits, types of visits. There are private entities that actively track medication prescribed by physicians. Generally speaking prescriptions indicate specific conditions as well as severity, this data is mind and cross tabulated a million different ways.

Then you have the HMO's, who already put every individual into mix and matched micro categories. This data is often sold, distilled and distributed thru a mired of solution systems.

Bottom line is
"THEY" know more than you can imagine.

[edit on 22-2-2009 by mental modulator]