| There's actually been a pretty good report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on this subject a while back: https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/pcast-health-it... It did not place the blame on insurance companies. Which I think is correct. Insurance companies affect billing, but they do not drive health care records management. That's driven by an entirely different set of companies such as Epic and Meditech. And the poor state of EHR in the USA is not entirely their fault, either. A lot of what went down is that universal standardization was not a major part of the requirements when the US government started requiring health IT. So health care providers decided to favor preserving their existing policies and procedures, which meant choosing extremely configurable EHR systems that allowed them to computerize their old paper-based systems with minimal modification. Since easy computer interoperability was never a design goal of those paper-based systems, it was not inherited by the EHR systems they grew into, either. This creates a situation where even two Epic customers, despite being on the same EHR platform, are still hard-pressed to directly transfer records between their systems, and are as likely as not to still just fax or email each other printouts because it's easier. And standardizing and perfecting insurance and billing would do nothing to fix this situation. The two systems are likely to be connected, but they are not the same thing. |