A Coordinated Medical Record System Is the Ultimate Patient-Focused System

The idea of a Coordinated Medical Record system, which literally produces a single comprehensive medical record for every patient. The record contains all of the patient’s clinical and financial healthcare information over space and time. The credit card industry is the model. This type of information system will do more to increase the quality and decrease the cost of healthcare simultaneously than any other single initiative. If the healthcare industry is truly interested in being patient-focused, then its information system should reflect that fact. A Coordinated Medical Record system is by definition the ultimate patient-focused system. If one was going to develop a patient-centered information system from scratch and had to decide whether all of a patient’s clinical and financial information should be in a single record or scattered among hundreds of different records, Occam’s Razor would definitely point to the single record – the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. If a single record is indeed the ideal patient-focused record, and it is also the type of record that will do the most to increase the quality and decrease the cost of healthcare simultaneously, then it seems reasonable to vigorously pursue the deployment of this type of record system both for the benefit of the patient and the industry as a whole.