Instead of an electronic system, we keep putting pen to paper and putting patients' lives at risk.
Competent and well-trained health-care workers are essential, but so is complete, timely information. Something we don't have.
When we look around us it is obvious that information technology has revolutionized every other part of our lives. Newspapers, radio, television, taxi drivers, banks, florists, airlines, trains, buses, book publishers, even pizza parlours, are miles ahead of health care.
With lives hanging on the edge, we are plodding along like a tired army mule.
Canada's health Info-way points out that each year, more than one-million physicians' exams and 500-million laboratory and radiology tests are performed plus 382-million prescriptions are written and then scattered across the health network, that in many cases is not integrated or not connected.
Instead, written reports or faxes are used and a ton of medical information is transferred by phone.
Instead of barreling down the highway at 100 clicks an hour, Ottawa and the provinces have promised to create electronic records for half of us by 2010 and the remainder by 2020.
Not good enough.
There is a serious short circuit in our health records' system and the sooner we get the power back on before we stumble into a major crisis, the better we will be.
Quelle/Source: The Daily Observer, 02.07.2007
