Within the week, I will be attending a national conference that is held annually for the society of Medical Informatics in Canada. This conference has a bit of a history and, as such, is referred to as either the eHealth Conference or COACH. It is usually held in alternating years at the two ends of the country - between Toronto and Vancouver (or Victoria, BC). This year the conference is held in Quebec City (May 27-30).
One popular feature during this conference is the plenary, the Great Debate. In the past, there are been a number of luminaries asked to speak on a variety of topics in a debate format! In recent years, there has been good discussion around Electronic Health Records and whether they are in fact the Holy Grail!
This year, the great debate question is: "Be it resolved, patients need full access to their electronic summary health record in order to achieve substantive improvements in patient safety and reform of the health system”. And I have been invited to be one of the four panelists for this debate.
I am sure that it is NO stretch to imagine that I will be debating the pro side. To be honest, it is very difficult for me to imagine anything but a pro side of this argument....how can getting access to more information be a bad thing?
Th question itself is even softened to the point that there is referral a summary health record and not even the full health record.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good arguments that have been put forth about the health record and how sensitive that information is. So there must be the proper controls in place to ensure that the early "years of access" go smoothly. Like anything else, if patients access gets turned on and then there is an immediate breach, there will be problems for a very long time.
Many other issues have been tied to the benefits of the EHR - such as privacy controls, patient safety and the improvements in health care outcomes. I do not believe that these are straight-forward at all and if we put too many eggs in this basket, there may be problems when they do not pan out as planned!
The emphasis must be on ownership, sharing of the workload and then reducing the demand for health services. I will be reporting on the lead-up to this conference this week and then live from the conference staring Monday next!
Comments