- Image by Rogers Memorial Hospital via Flickr
From an editorial in the Wisconsin State Journal.
Health care is the next big debate in Congress.
How do we control costs? How do we insure more people? How do we improve medical care?
There are few easy answers.
But one answer cannot be dismissed or delayed any longer: More health facilities across Wisconsin and the nation need to convert and commit to electronic medical records. Doing so will lower medical costs and improve care.
Researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin studied the introduction and implementation of an electronic medical system at a family clinic in Milwaukee over two years. Their findings, reported this month in the Wisconsin Medical Journal, are telling.
The productivity of the physicians rose immediately and significantly and stayed at higher levels throughout the study, the researchers found.
Yet two-thirds of the physicians, when surveyed about the change, mistakenly thought the opposite was true. They thought they were spending more time on electronic records than they formerly did on paper records.
For more of this article please see the Wisconsin State Journal website here.
