Don't Forget Obamacare's Electronic Medical Records Wreck
By Michelle Malkin
October 22, 2013 at 7:05pm

Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, a Philadelphia orthopedic surgeon, has a timely reminder for everyone encountering the federal health care exchange meltdown: "If you think signing up for Obamacare is a nightmare, ask your doctor how the EMR mandate is going."
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Instead of concentrating on care, doctors face exhausting regulatory battles over the definition of "meaningful use" of technology, skyrocketing costs and unwarranted Big Brother intrusions on the practice of medicine.

As I reported last year, Obamacare's top-down, tax-subsidized, job-killing, privacy-undermining electronic record-sharing scheme has been a big fat bust. More than $4 billion in "incentives" has been doled out to force doctors and hospitals to convert and upgrade by 2015. But favored EMR vendors, including Obama bundler Judy Faulkner's Epic Systems, have undermined rather than enhanced interoperability. Oversight remains lax. And after hyping the alleged benefits for nearly a decade, the RAND Corporation finally 'fessed up that its cost-savings predictions of $81 billion a year—used repeatedly to support the Obama EMR mandate—were (like every other Obamacare promise) vastly overstated.
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In June, the Annals of Emergency Medicine published a study warning that the "rush to capitalize on the huge federal investment of $30 billion for the adoption of electronic medical records led to some unfortunate and unintended consequences" tied to "communication failure, poor data display, wrong order/wrong patient errors and alert fatigue." Also this summer, Massachusetts reported that 60 percent of doctors could not meet the EMR mandate and face potential loss of their licenses in 2015. And a few weeks ago, the American College of Physicians pleaded with the feds to delay the mandate's data collection, certification and reporting requirements.
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Let me underscore that again: Doctors face steep penalties if they can't meet the radical technology goals imposed by the very same glitch-plagued Obamacare bureaucrats who now need an emergency "tech surge" to fix their own failed info-tech Titanic. The Obamacare wrecking ball has only just begun.


http://www.vdare.com/articles/dont-forge...l-records-wreck