Viewpoint

Healthcare professionals prepare for all types of disaster. ED physicians and first responders plan for mass-casualty events. IT directors plan for network recovery after system failure and data loss. Operations directors consider how to keep hospitals going when Internet access, supplies and power become limited or non-existent. C-level executives examine the overall repercussions and ensure continuity of the business during disaster and its aftermath.

According to the 2007 HIMSS Leadership Survey, which every year asks CIOs and IT directors to specify which IT technologies are most important to their healthcare organizations now and in the future, 54 percent of respondents indicated that "implementing technology to reduce medical errors and increase patient safety," such as EMRs, is their organization's top priority today.

Can America have its cake and eat it too? The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—good legislation originally intended to enable patients to retain their healthcare when changing jobs—has grown into something of a nuisance for researchers who now spend more time placating government bureaucracy than they do completing research studies. According to a recent national survey of more than 1,500 epidemiologists, which was commissioned by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), three quarters of the respondents believe that HIPAA has not "enhanced participants' confidentiality and privacy," but instead, has "had a substantial, negative influence on the conduct of human-subjects health research, often adding uncertainty, cost and delay."

On November 5, 2007, CCHIT announced it had certified 40 percent of ambulatory EMRs and 25 percent of inpatient EMRs. Around the same time I visited my doctor to receive treatment for a mild condition and was surprised when he pulled a tattered old formulary book from his pocket to look up the medication he wanted to prescribe. He's a young man and wore an electronic device on his hip, and yet he turned to a book when he needed facts on medications. I realized my perception of him was wrong. I had assumed he used a decision-support device when in reality he did not. I inquired and he explained that his brain was faster and better than the database, but that he always checked himself before prescribing medications.