Write it down
Three-fourths of the nation’s doctors practice in small offices, with 10 doctors or fewer. For most of them, an investment in digital health records looks like a cost for which they are not reimbursed.It is scarcely surprising, then, that only about 17 percent of the nation’s physicians are using computerized patient records, according to a government-sponsored survey published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine.“This is really not a technology problem,” observed Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s a matter of incentives and market failure.”
That market failure is a principal target of the Obama administration’s plan. A main feature of the legislation calls for incentive payments of more than $40,000 spread over a few years for a physician who buys and uses electronic health records.
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."