EHR importance vastly oversold? Community health center battles for electronic patients' records - but patient care goes on anyway

There are two lessons from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story below.1) Beware outsourcing the ownership of your hospital or clinic's medical records.2) The value of EHRs has been massively and repeatedly exaggerated.  Milwaukee Health Services have been operating without access to electronic patient charts for almost a month, yet there are no reports of massive casualties.  There are numerous reports on this blog of EHR system downtimes lasting weeks, loss and sabotage of electronic records, and other mishaps, yet patient care is claimed to have not been compromised.  Perhaps those who make such claims need to be taken at face value. It follows that expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars for EHR systems is simply unnecessary and the technology's importance vastly oversold.Excerpts are below; read the full story at the hyperlink.-- SSCommunity health center battles for patients' recordsBy Guy Boulton of the Journal SentinelJuly 20, 2013Doctors at Milwaukee Health Services have not had access to the medical records of 40,000 patients since June 30, when an Atlanta company cut off the community health center's access to its electronic medical records after their contract ended.Milwaukee Health Services sued Business Computer Applications Inc., the Atlanta company, last week in federal court and is seeking a court order to restore access to patients' medical records.The records include patients' medications, problem lists, allergies, immunization records...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: healthcare IT difficulties Milwaukee Health Services EHR oversell Source Type: blogs