Laird Center for Medical Research

Roundtable Video Transcript

Predictions for a national electronic medical record

Gene Shaw: Gene Shaw, pathology. This is for Doctor Starren. Is a national electronic medical record to facilitate information transfer, lower costs and improve patient care...is that possible, and if possible, when do you think it could occur?

Justin Starren: I thought I said predicting technology was hard (laughs). I think what we'll see in health care is analagous to what we have in banking, which I think, in this country, for many reasons...we're not going to have one giant database buried in Cheyenne Mountain, that has everyone's medical record. But rather, we will have a federated system where the electronic medical records that are used by different organizations are interoperable and able to transfer records.

So, when you go from doctor A to doctor B, you can transfer your records in a matter of seconds, rather than in a matter of weeks. In terms of when that will actually occur, I think we're already seeing it starting to occur in some of the regional areas. I think in terms of wide scale movement of data, we are probably looking at about five more years.