Dirty Little Secret of Health Informatics

I have just posted a new article describing another flagrant deficiency of the medical industrial complex. The title of the article is:

THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF THE HEALTH INFORMATICS INDUSTRY: Without a reliable patient identifier system, electronic health records (EHRs) are worthless; And most systems are unreliable.

Seriously, patient identifiers are at the heart of the push to create electronic health records for everyone. The purpose of the article is to describe the kinds of problems that arise when patient identifiers are unreliable. Most institutions simply do not have in place a sensible system to ensure that every patient has a unique identifier, and that all of the reports for a patient are permanently "held together" by the identifier. The article also describes the features of a patient identifier system, emphasizing the essential role of identifiers in healthcare and biomedical research.

The article is available on my web site at:

http://www.julesberman.info/book/id_deid.htm

© 2011 Jules J. Berman