Doubling the Cost of EMRs
Did you know that it cost billions a year to protect our massive EMR (electronic medical record) system? Why? Well, here are some things you should know:
- An individual health care record brings up to $50 on the black market, 10 times as much as a stolen credit card number.
- Each hacked record could cost a company around $20 in legal costs and credit protection.
- Hacks already cost the health care industry about $6 billion a year, according to an industry-funded report.
- An estimated $2 billion worth of health-related cyber insurance was sold last year, and the market is growing at 20 to 25 percent a year.
So, the cost that is added to our already bloated healthcare system is $8 billion. Why hasn’t anyone sat down and run the numbers? They need to ask the question. Was the cost of EMRs worth the price of switching over from paper charts? Secondly, it is assumed that it gave better care but did it?
Also, see that $50 black market value above? That is per record! How much do you think each one costs when sold legally? I don’t have the answer but it is being done on every system, every day. Your data is being parsed and sold. Does it have your name on it? Who knows? I certainly don’t trust anyone to keep it a secret. This is so scary and yet we are blind to it all.
Perry, it’s not as benign as hemorrhoids. The dark side of the consumer marketing economy is the ability to entwine people with perspectives, values and beliefs that are not rationally chosen, but subliminally conveyed to them by techniques that deliberately bypass their individual rational choices. When’s the last car commercial you’ve ever seen that set out to argue the rational superiority of their product to the competitors? How…1950’s! That’s when the ad-masters realized the benefit of subliminal persuasion..and embraced the Skinnerian approach to customer manipulation. Given that the vast majority of Americans are financially bust, marketing must be working.
And to micro-target the advertising to the customer, advertising psychology has gone high-tech. If you can pigeonhole individuals by their psychological prejudices and weaknesses, you can target them for exposure to certain categories of persuasion. Watch the next drug company direct-to-consumer advertizing, and see if you get this.
The drug companies, of course, have to mow down the obstacle – the doctors who “refuse to give the customer what he/she wants.” The adversarial approach towards physicians moves the product – and how! It’s important, not only to expose the consumer to the name of your product, but be part of the general movement to chop down the obstacles to increased sales – and that’s the doctor.
In the old days, they used to seduce doctors with product and literature, to be collaborators. Now, they’re out to steamroller the impediments. But first, they have to collect a large dataset of manipulable customer-subjects, and target the subliminal message to the weaknesses of each one. That’s why your medical profile is so profitable – and made even more so by the huge amount of information they collect which is ancillary to genuine medical treatment, but useful for personality-tailoring databases.
It’s never about your hemorrhoids.
Well said, Steve, but either way you cut it, it’s a huge Pain in the A–!
By the way, most of my patients get caught up in the drug ads— until they start listing the side effects…
As someone who had identity theft stolen from Anthem, this trend makes me very nervous. I really don’t care if someone knows I had hemorrhoids, but I care very much if they get my birthdate and SS number.
Then there’s this bit of propaganda:
http://thehealthcareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Kareo_Private_Practice_EHR_Infographic.pdf