Information Playground

Obama and Digitized Healthcare Records

I was reading a Wall Street journal article about President-elect Obama's "to-do list" for the five broad spending areas that his administration plans on pursuing. The fifth one caught my eye: Digitized Health Records.

A quote from the article:

"the  country's $2 trillion health care system is clogged with paper, folders and  plenty of clipboards. Some 90% of U.S. doctors and at least two-thirds  of hospitals still rely on paper patient records, and many of those who have  gone digital can't exchange the information with outside providers. The result  is billions of dollars each year in administrative waste, duplicate tests and  medical errors"

I'll be interested in watching these U.S. government decisions roll out.

Will the US make the same decision that Finland did?

Centera and Medical Imaging

I've spent some time this year writing about how digital archiving is a perfect match for EMC Centera. Digitized records, photos, videos, and audio tracks from the JFK Library represent fixed content, and Centera is optimized for the storage of fixed content. It's also scalable enough to store the number of objects being generated at the library.

Centera's compliance and tamper-proof authentication capabilities are also being deployed in the US Court System.  I've written a post about King County District Court in Seattle that provides more detail.

Another match made in heaven when it comes to Centera is medical imaging.  I mentioned in a post earlier this year that the country of Finland has purchased Centera as the centerpiece of a deep repository for safely keeping the medical records of all of its citizens.

When an entire nation chooses to store all of its medical records on Centera, it is safe to say that the product has arrived as a technology of choice for hospitals and medical applications.  In fact, no less than 1,700 healthcare organizations are currently using Centera. And that number is growing.

Here's why.