[Infowarrior] - Your data or your life

[Richard Forno]

Your data or your life

By Kirk Strauser

Online on: 08/08/2006

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1709

Your daughter has just been in a car crash. She falls unconscious on her way
to the hospital, but not before she is able to tell the paramedics the name
of her doctor. This is vitally important because the emergency room won¹t
know that she¹s an insulin-dependent diabetic with a penicillin allergy, but
her doctor will be able to give them her relevant medical history.

Or, at least he would be if he¹d renewed the tech support contract on his
medical records software. He didn¹t, though, and now his information‹and
your daughter¹s‹is locked away in a proprietary database he can¹t access.

As unlikely and alarmist as this sounds, it could really happen. Intracare
is the publisher of a popular practice management system called Dr. Notes.
When some doctors balked at a drastic increase in their annual software
lease, they were cut off from accessing their own patients¹ information.

This situation is completely unconscionable. There can be no truly open
doctor-patient relationship when an unrelated third party is the de facto
owner of and gatekeeper to all related data.

In the short term, cases like the example above are all too possible, and
simply unacceptable in every way. With today¹s large practices built around
large numbers of patients, many using multiple prescription medicines, these
practice management systems are absolutely critical and can¹t be permitted
to be held ransom. Additionally, doctors in the United States are saddled
with a giant bureaucratic tangle known as HIPAA. Even if a doctor and her
software vendor are working happily together, the government may take a dim
view of an outside party controlling access to patient records.

In the long term, patients could lose their own medical history as doctors
migrate from one proprietary system to another by simply starting over
rather than paying thousands of dollars for expensive data format
conversion. Even if you have an excellent personal relationship with your
doctor, a relocation or changes to your insurance could make you need a copy
of your records to give to a new doctor¹s office. Your old physician may
know to monitor that funny looking spot on your shoulder, but might not have
entered it into the new system he put in place since your last visit.

Finally, practice management software can be extremely expensive. Doctors
have to pass these expenses along to their patients, increasing treatment
costs for all involved.

Fortunately, the situation isn¹t entirely bleak. New online communities are
developing to build and market free software solutions. LinuxMedNews is a
regularly updated online forum for discussing industry news. GPLMedicine is
a similar site maintained by Fred Trotter, project manager for the Free
software ClearHealth management system. A project by Canada¹s McMaster
University, OSCAR, became the first IT system certified by OntarioMD.

Although these don¹t have the name recognition among the medical community
of commercial ventures such as Dr. Notes, they¹re available for testing and
implementation‹free of charge and usage restrictions‹today.

If you are a doctor or other healthcare provider, you owe it to yourself and
your patients to take a look at these forums and applications. At the worst,
you¹ll find them uninteresting and unuseful. However, you could also find
ways to protect your patients¹ and your own best interests‹all while saving
money.

If you are a patient, print a copy of this blog and hand it to your doctor
next time you see her. She may not be aware that there are viable
alternatives to the expensive, restrictive systems she¹s been leasing. If
she¹s not interested, you¹ve lost nothing. If she finds something useful,
though, then you may have done a real service to yourself, your doctor, and
your fellow patients.
Copyright information

This blog entry is (C) Copyright, Kirk Strauser, 2004-2006. Unless a
different license is specified in the entry's body, the following license
applies: "Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is
permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved
and appropriate attribution information (author, original site, original
URL) is included".