Dear Jon Stewart,
I'm a huge fan of your “Daily Show,” but last week, with your segment, “The Red Tape Diaries,” you and your staff waded into the swamps of health information technology, made more dense and impenetrable by the Defense and Veterans Affairs bureaucracies.
By the sound of it, your hearts were in the right place, but you made a hash of a couple of things.
One topic covered by your segment was the alleged lack of interoperability between the VistA and AHLTA electronic health-record systems at the VA and DoD.
The other was the backlog of disability benefits claims at the VA, currently in excess of 900,000 claims and growing. A backlog, I might point out, that's exacerbated by the time it takes the Defense Department to round up and deliver to the VA all the medical records needed to document a service-related injury. It's a broken element that you didn't mention.
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I've written about plans to scrap the Veterans Affairs Department's VistA electronic health-record system and replace I've written before about plans to scrap the Veterans Affairs Department's VistA electronic health-record system and replace it with a whole new EHR system built from scratch, jointly, with the military, but it bears repeating—that idea, building a whole new EHR system, was worse than nutty.
Taxpayers have invested billions of dollars in VistA. The development effort, started in 1977, produced one of the best EHRs ever, maybe the best.
I was personally introduced to VistA in 2003 by Dr. Louis Coulson, who graciously gave me a demonstration at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago.
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Sometime before the end of March, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology will be releasing new tools to help providers wanting to digitize the process of obtaining patient consent before releasing their medical records to regional or statewide health information exchanges.
The tools, developed in a pilot project in western New York, include educational videos that can be shown to patients on tablet computers, which also run software that enables patients to digitally record their consent (or not). The videos were developed following a random survey of western New Yorkers and several focus group meetings, with the aim of ascertaining what patients might want to know before they commit to making their electronic records available to the exchange.
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