A hidden tech defect in Obamacare patient records requirement

Michele Malkin:

Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, a Philadelphia orthopedic surgeon, has a timely reminder for everyone encountering the federal health-care-exchange meltdown: “If you think signing up for ObamaCare is a nightmare, ask your doctor how the EMR [electronic medical records] mandate is going.”

The White House finally acknowledged the spectacular public disaster of ObamaCare’s Internet site during Monday’s Rose Garden infomercial. But President Obama and his sales team are AWOL on the bureaucratic ravages of the federal electronic medical records mandate.

Modernized data collection is a worthy goal, of course. But distracted doctors are seeing “more pixels than patients,” Dr. DiNubile observes, and the EMR edict is foisting “dangerous user-unfriendly technology” on physicians and patients.

Instead of concentrating on care, doctors face exhausting regulatory battles over the definition of “meaningful use” of technology, skyrocketing costs and unwarranted Big Brother intrusions on the practice of medicine.

As I reported last year, ObamaCare’s electronic-record-sharing scheme has been a big fat bust. More than $4 billion in “incentives” has been doled out to force doctors and hospitals to convert and upgrade by 2015. But favored EMR vendors, including Obama bundler Judy Faulkner’s Epic Systems, have undermined rather than enhanced interoperability. Oversight remains lax.

And, after hyping the alleged benefits for nearly a decade, the RAND Corporation finally ’fessed up that its cost-savings predictions of $81 billion a year — used repeatedly to support the Obama EMR mandate — were (like every other ObamaCare promise) vastly overstated.
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There is much more.

This is control freak government at work.   It is what we can expect from the full implementation of Obamacare.  The government is just not very good at managing this sort of ting.