Why do I care about EHRs?

Many people have asked why I'm focusing my efforts on electronic heath records. Computerizing medical records has been on my mind for a long time based on personal experiences. I don't know anyone who has died or been badly mistreated as the result of handwritten records, as Denis Quaids children were.

• But when I visited an Aunt who was dieing of brain cancer, I discovered that her primary doctor had no idea what the others doctors were doing and couldn't figure it without calling doctors and the pharmacy.
• Several years ago, I asked one of my doctors for my records, which he gave me and which were totally unreadable. Useless.
• A friend of mine recently had moderately serious surgery at a major university hospital. Over the weekend, she was in terrible pain. Instead of going to a highly praised emergency room close to her home, she drove to the prestigious hospital where she had been treated, thinking that its emergency room could pull up her records and understand better what might be causing the pain. Wrong. The emergency room said it would take two days to get her records ... from their own hospital. This is just plain wrong.
• Plus it drives me nuts having to write my family history, etc. every time I see a new doctor and they still don't really have enough information to make fully informed decisions.

Of course, there are a lot of other aspects of health care that drive me crazy: doctors not coordinating their efforts; insurance company and medical institution bureaucracies; the need for patient advocates; the fact that a hospital cannot tell you how much your treatment may cost, etc.

But given my technology background, the medical record area seems appropriate. And despite the huge complications -- security/privacy, interoperability, standards, the cost, etc., this area seems like a relatively simple piece of health care reform where I could have a huge impact. I also think that patients/people need to have more awareness and control over their own health care, which having a formal record could encourage that. But more on that another day.