Welcome to Baby Boomer Health Care

Dr. David Brailer was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal regarding the idea of individuals having access to their own electronic health (EHR)records.  If you look around our website you will find  many EHR articles directed to healthcare professionals regarding setting up their offices with EHRs.  The government is even providing a cash incentive for those healthcare providers who set up an EHR system and follow specific guidelines set up by the government to reach “meaningful use.”  

What does this mean for us babyboomers?  There are definite advantages and perhaps some disadvantages.  A couple of the advantages are that we could obtain access to our medical records so that we will have information regarding medications, lab reports, x-rays, etc., no matter where we are.  It also means the possibility of going to an office who is unfamiliar with your situation yet would be able access all your records with a couple of “clicks” on the keyboard.

The negative of this is probably obvious.  The security and privacy aspect.  There are some concerns regarding information being hacked into but, this is also true of paper chart keeping. So, it isn’t an issue to be feared only if your records are kept electronically.

The Wall Street Journal refers to Dr. Brailer as  America’s first digital health czar and from my listening to the interview,  it appears he is very supportive of having medical records available to us electronically and he added that he felt it would be us babyboomers who push the EHR’s through the system to become as commonly used as emails.  

I think it is a great idea and I believe it would cut down on mistakes made by healthcare professionals. What do you think about it?