> This is a problem technology could dramatically reduce if each of us had a complete medical/medication history that was immediately accessible to the physicians/institutions treating us. That doesn't exist now unless you're getting all your treatment/meds from one company/hospital system
Local / regional Health Information Exchanges and efforts to combine them at the State level are now chipping way at this problem. An example is the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY): http://www.nyehealth.org/shin-ny/what-is-the-shin-ny/
The main challenges are not technical (though data integration must be a nightmare and is almost certainly being done in a wrong and mostly useless way), but social.
Local / regional Health Information Exchanges and efforts to combine them at the State level are now chipping way at this problem. An example is the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY): http://www.nyehealth.org/shin-ny/what-is-the-shin-ny/
The main challenges are not technical (though data integration must be a nightmare and is almost certainly being done in a wrong and mostly useless way), but social.