Article- Health Records Banks

Let’s say you have just moved across country with your family. Let’s say you’re moving in to your new home and, while performing some minor repair on your house, you cut your thumb badly with a small saw.

So you head to the emergency room or urgent care center. You don’t have your medical records with you – the last thought in your head as blood spurts from your thumb was to hunt down the medical records still packed away in a box in the garage – but your spouse isn’t worried, for she has the “card.”

As you arrive at the site and nurses and orderlies hustle you into triage, your wife stands at the window and hands the receptionist a card which looks very much like a debit card issued by your bank. The receptionist swipes it through a card reader and up on her computer screen appears your medical history. Everything is there – the date of your last physical, the date your appendix burst at age 33, your allergy to penicillin, your insurance company and number. It’s all there.

How a Health Record Bank might work

Such a scenario – or something very similar – could become a part of the nation’s health care system in the next few years.

In fact, there are those who strongly believe it should be a part of your experience with your health care provider.

“Americans need a connected system of electronic healthcare information available to all doctors and patients whenever and wherever necessary,” wrote the National Institute of Health’s Commission on Systemic Interoperability wrote in the executive summary of its October 2005 report titled Ending the Document Game: Connecting and Transforming Your Healthcare Through Information Technology.

Medical Errors - the cost

In strong language the summary states:

Medical errors are killing more people per year, in America, than breast cancer, AIDS, or motor vehicle accidents,” the report continues. “This pain and suffering is compounded by the knowledge that many of these errors could have been avoided.

The lack of immediate access to patient healthcare information is the source of one-fifth of these errors.

One of every seven primary care visits is affected by missing medical information. In a recent study, 80 percent of errors were initiated by miscommunication, including missed communication between physicians, misinformation in medical records, mishandling of patient requests and messages, inaccessible records, mislabeled specimens, misfiled or missing charts, and inadequate reminder systems.

Under the current paper-based system, patients and their doctors lack instant, constant access to medical information. As a result, when a patient sees more than one doctor, no doctor knows exactly what another doctor is doing, or even that another doctor is involved. The consequences range from inconvenient to critical or even fatal. Each time an individual encounters a new healthcare provider, that patient must retell his or her medical history. Not only is this redundant, it can introduce error and imprecision, ensuring that no two copies of a personal medical record will be exactly alike. In an emergency, delay and a lack of information can be deadly.

In the age of the Internet, this shortcoming is unacceptable.

And then the question arises: who would administer such a system? What would it look like?

Many believe they have an answer and they call it a health record bank. And proponents already are moving to create them.

What the Federal government is doing....

Legislators from both the House and the Senate this summer introduced two very similar bills, legislation known as the Independent Health Record Act. The legislation (House of Representatives Bill 5559 and Senate Bill 3454) would, according to one of the bills’ authors, U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) provide “legal and regulatory guidelines for the establishment of independent health record banks that would store a patient’s electronic health records, in effect creating a nationwide health information network.”

The bills call for non-profit cooperatives to form the health record banks. The co-ops would maintain members’ medical records for a fee. The records would be available to members via a swipe card.

Others, though, think a nationwide health information network built on top of the country’s already extant banking industry makes more sense.                 

A think tank located in Franklin, Tennessee, called the Medical Banking Project, (also known as the MBProject) is one of the biggest proponents of the bank-centric model.

In a June 16 story published in the Kansas City Business Journal, John Casillas, executive director of the MBProject said:

"The financial industry is positioned to roll out health record banking quicker and less expensively due to its nationwide electronic networks, 55 million online customers and existing accounts with health care providers and insurers.

Yet no matter what form a nationwide record bank make take – whether it is using the existing structure and know-how of the nation’s financial services industry, or non-profit cooperatives overseeing the process, or another system of – all proponents of an electronic medical record bank agree that a nationwide system has a tremendous live-saving potential.        

“If doctors have better information they can do a better job of treating patients,” Sen. Brownback said in his release about the Independent Health Record Act. “Equipped with ready access to a patient’s medical history, doctors will not have to make as many guesses about what procedures or treatments might be appropriate. Studies have shown that the adoption of electronic medical records could save billions of dollars because fewer unnecessary procedures will be performed, and medical errors will be reduced.”

The time has come to provide such a service to the nation’s health care users, proponents argue.

Or, as the Ending the Document Game executive summary puts it:

“Lives are in the balance.”