Friday, January 05, 2018

A bad idea to force doctors to contribute to National Electronic Health Record database

The government plans to pass a law to make it compulsory for doctors to upload the medical records of their patients for each occasion that the patient sees the doctor. The data is to be upload to the National Electronic Health Record database.

I think that this is a bad idea. The doctors would be wasting a lot of time to upload information of minor ailments of patients.
Most of the records would be not useful and would clutter up the database.

As a first step. I suggest that only hospital stays and medical checkups be uploaded into the NEHR database.

The government can encourage patients to go for a medical checkup at regular intervals by subsidising all or a large part of the
cost. In return for the subsidy, the patients have to agree that the report would be uploaded into NEHR.

At a later date, the doctors should be required to report certain types of major medical conditions.

I believe that this approach would achieve the goal of getting just-in-time medical data of patients without inposing a heavy
burden on doctors.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

If GPs etc are forced to inform everything to NEHR, most consumers won't be able to hide or plead ignorance about their health status to many organisations. These can include insurance companies, current & prospective employers, govt bodies etc.

It can be used to increase costs & premiums to individuals on basic mandatory items such as Medishield Life and CPF Home Protection Scheme or DPS.

This will be a good example of big data & data analytics being turned on its head & affecting individuals on personal basis.

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