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There's actually a project on the Big Island that won over 16 million dollars from the federal government's Beacon Community grant, that was spearheaded by UH Hilo, to provide for Electronic Medical Records as well as providing better access to medical care to the residents of the Big Island.
Check out the news article here: http://www.hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=3600.
It would be good for UH to put together more studies aimed at public health, but they'd better make sure their budgets can afford to pay for access to the data they need.
I like to track health care issues, thanks for writing this. The keyword here is "anonymized." People need to feel comfortable and in control of their personal information before they'll allow it to be available for large-scale data mining.
Nice to see Hawaii in the lead as well on using EMR. It would be a boon to see more policy decisions driven by hard-headed analysis of accurate patient data. I can see how this would really help with preventive care. By catching trends early, health authorities can issue warnings and advisories to nip problems in the bud.
On the flip side, I wish there were more mechanisms for reviewing doctors and hospitals. For example, it's ridiculously easy to look up reviews of restaurants. I could get recommendations of good pizza places from a million sources. Even easier to find ratings for movies. But for critical decisions like choosing a personal physician, the existing options online are meager.
A couple years back, there was an excellent documentary by PBS Frontline called Sick Around the World. The reporter visited five countries to inspect their health systems.
Taiwan issues smart cards to all its citizens for record-keeping and payment processing. Here's an NPR story on it by the same journalist who did that PBS film: Taiwan takes fast track to universal health care. The smart cards work incredibly well--Taiwan's administrative costs are under 2 percent.
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