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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

VA Medical Records Model

There has been a lot of reporting about the VA and how bad the program is for our Veterans. Most of the criticism comes from the main Walter Reed facility that was not properly maintained. Criticisms are appropriate in certain circumstances, however the VA does a lot of things the right way.

One important thing that the VA does good is digital medical records. Many times when you switch doctors or apply for health insurance, you have to physically get your own medical records from your doctor and hand them to your new doctor. Doctors don't like to spend time with this, and sometimes they charge for the extra administration work.

The VA has all of its medical records in a computer data base. Any time a VA patient goes from one facility to the next, the new doctor only has to pull up the records on the global database. This saves time and money from administering medical records. All doctors treating the same patient have the same information.

I have issues with many things that the Clintons did to health care when they were in office - including the privacy acts which don't seem to help anything but lawyers. However, they were responsible for the modernization of the medical records in the VA facility. As a result, the VA is a model of how medical records should be kept and transferred from doctor to doctor seamlessly.

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