A post by Pat
Another oopsie for the NHS. Their organ donation database had a glitch resulting in removal of organs from patients who hadn’t bequeathed them. Don’t worry, they were dead. Things haven’t gotten that bad over there…yet.
Organs removed from dead patients without family consent after NHS blunder
Around 800,000 people have had their wishes over donating organs wrongly recorded due to an IT error affecting the UK donor register. An investigation found that 45 individuals with false donor information have since died. The NHS is to contact around 20 families who allowed organs to be taken after being misinformed about what consent had been given.
NHS ‘organ donor error’ review to take place
Huddersfield University student Stephen Banks agreed to donate organs when he renewed his driving licence. “I decided I was happy to donate my liver, lungs, pancreas and kidneys. But a few days later, on 17 February, I received a letter from the NHS thanking me for donating and telling me I had also donated my eyes. I was shocked as I knew I hadn’t agreed to that. I didn’t know how to correct the mistake and I’m too embarrassed to call them and say ‘You can’t have my eyes.’ So, at the moment I’m donating everything.
To paraphrase a computer tech maxim: “Garbage in, internal organs out”. At least this glitch was confined to dead people. What kind of glitches lie ahead for the electronic medical record (EMRs or EHRs) system President Obama wants in place by 2014? He’s spending millions from the stimulus slush fund to move along the system. He makes EMR sound like a panacea for preventing medical errors and for saving gazillions of dollars in health care costs. Aside from the privacy concerns, the promise is greatly exaggerated and could wind up increasing health care costs and create even more errors.
Last I checked, Barack Obama isn’t much of an expert on computer technology. In fact, the President doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’ll be spending too much money too fast for a system that will probably cause more problems than it fixes.
President-Elect Urges Electronic Medical Records in 5 Years
“To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that, within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized,” Obama said in a speech from George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests.”
“But it just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs; it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health-care system,” he said.
Obama: we need EMRs; NAS report: be careful what you ask for
…the relevant take-home is clear: simply deciding to digitize medical records may help in some regards, but it’s not going to modernize medical care unless the process is handled with medicine, rather than business interest, in mind. Although the decision to do so is an important one, setting an arbitrary time limit to achieve it may shift the focus to expanding the use of the systems now in use; the report makes it clear that doing so is likely to be a mistake.
Those Electronic Medical Records Obama So Loves? A Bit Clunky
While they concede that paperless hospitals could pay off down the road, they warn that choosing the wrong IT system–say one that isn’t customized for medical use–could make hospitals even more costly than they already are.
EMRs aren’t likely to improve health care unless they’re designed well and used the right way.
Obama’s Computerized Hospital Vision May Have Blind Spot
In January [2009], a scathing National Research Council report described commercial EHRs as producing inefficiencies, inaccuracies and general disappointment. For every study showing EHR-based improvements in patient care, another shows faults. Stories like that of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh — where death rates doubled in kids transferred to the hospital after EHR implementation — are cautionary reminders of the risks of moving too fast
“It’s definitely going to change the way business is done. In some cases for the better, and in some cases not for the better,” said Koch.
I believe improved computer technology for medical record keeping has positive potential. There are huge issues both ethically and technologically to work out. Our know-nothing President thinks any idea about keeping records on people must be good and it can’t happen fast enough. He’s willing to bet your life on it.
Huge potential for abuse.
http://tinyurl.com/y7njcvz
passed in Porkulous I with republican votes. roundly ignored.
it’s funny how leftists jump on every conspiracy theory involving ufos, janis joplin and jim morrison being alive and well, and Halliburton but fail to be the least bit upset about being catalogued , even genetically toe tagged (hospitals have been found to be collecting dna from children without parental consent- http://tinyurl.com/c6hphd ) by a government who will have access to one’s most private records. how they scream when they figure out the feds may be able access their library book withdrawal history- but not a peep about unlimited access to a listing of their std’s, abortions and penile implants. oh and don’t forget psychiatric records which many on the left probably have reams of.
“What didn’t come up during the president’s first press conference was how one section of the convoluted legislation–it’s approximately 800 pages total–is intended to radically reshape the nation’s medical system by having the government establish computerized medical records that would follow each American from birth to death.
Billions will be handed to companies creating these databases. Billions will be handed to universities to incorporate patient databases “into the initial and ongoing training of health professionals.” There’s a mention of future “smart card functionality.”
Yet nowhere in this 140-page portion of the legislation does the government anticipate that some Americans may not want their medical histories electronically stored, shared, and searchable. Although a single paragraph promises that data-sharing will “be voluntary,” there’s no obvious way to opt out. “-declan mcullagh/ cnet news
http://tinyurl.com/begzoy
Something wicked this way comes. It occurred to me that the reason Supreme Court Justice Stevens is retiring is about legacy. He maybe wants to be safely gone before a lawsuit regarding the constitutionality of the Health Care bill works its way up to the top court.
It seems Progressives want the Commerce Clause to be their gateway to taking ultimate power over all the rights of the people. If they can make you buy health care insurance under the Commerce Clause, why can’t they make you pay for dressing your kids in brown shirts, and sending them off to National Service camps? Why can’t they “deem” that a person doing the job you do, must change to job X instead, and be shipped to Detroit to do it, at the salary they “deem appropriate?”
A person who reaches a high enough post often begins to think about legacy.
The Court that subordinates all the rights of the people and the states to the Federal government is going have that legacy around its neck like a dead albatross. Justice Stevens is running like hell I think. He is also giving “President” Obama plenty of time to filter through candidates, behind the smoke and mirrors, and find a stealth Fascist to pry at that gate from within our Supreme Court.
Where the U.S. once strove to take humanity to the heavens, we now find our Astronauts paying for passage with foreign nations, to a space station we once helped build, as the mechanism for subverting all the rights of the people is forced amid great dishonor through Congress, openly thwarting the clearly expressed will of the people, and paraded before our eyes as “hope and change.” When questioned as to the constitutionality, the Majority Speaker Of The house Of Representatives said “Are you kidding?”
This could arguably have been Democrat mass stupidity, but I “deem” it to be quite deliberate dereliction of their patriotic and perhaps legal duties to our Constitution, and subversion of the rights of the people.
How’s that for a legacy?