Kling on the EMR

A nice discussion by Arnold Kling on Tech Central Station on pitfalls to expect on the road to electronic medical records (EMRs)....
His reminds us that computer systems must be viewed in the organizational context in which they will be employed, and the health care context is a particularly complex one. He then points out two specific problems.
One is that in the current health care system, no one really owns the whole of a patient's medical record. Yet it is hard to understand how an EMR would work if no one is responsible for any given patient's record. Apparently, the Gingrich proposal includes the formation of regional health information networks. Yet if these have no power, their formation will not solve the lack of ownership problem. On the other hand, if they have the power to own the records, they risk becoming "a new and potentially intrusive entrant into the health care system."
Kling suggests instead that primary care physicians should become accountable for each patient's health care (gasp). Of course, right now primary care and generalist physicians are an embattled species, and there is little support right now for improving our lot.
The other, perhaps better known problem is the requirement for a large number of interfaces to support a large number of types of transactions done by a large number of different actors. Kling contrasted this situation with, for example, electronic banking in which the number of different kinds of actors and different kinds of transactions is small.
I don't think Kling has actually described all the important pitfalls. The elephant in this room remains the poorly understood structure of medical and health care data. Simply storing data as text and images would be clumsy, and sacrifices the ability of computers to truly process data. But we may not yet know how to store health care data other than as word processing and image files.
My fear remains that the EMR is just the latest business fad to captivate health care leaders who don't really understand the health care context. Remember mergia mania? And when physicians are forced to cope with clumsy systems that don't really work well in the clinical context, the health care leaders will be onto their next fad. We'll see.