Proposal : National Healthcare Registry

This article describes problems with communicating useful medical information at hospitals. This has always been a problem, but is more troubling recently. With advances in information technology, communicating data has become much easier in pretty much every other field, and this magnifies the problems in health care. Taking this into consideration I propose a simple solution: a national registry of health-care information much like a credit bureau. Basically it contains all pertinent medical information in a central location, including things like prescription medications and previous medical emergencies and conditions. Whether it is run by a private institution like Equifax or held as a central government database, it would be accessed for both read and write operations by any licensed medical group in the same way that banks and credit companies use credit bureaus. Identification could be linked with either Social Security numbers or health insurance cards to make emergency or on-site identification possible. Worries about security or privacy should have largely been answered by the recent health insurance and portability protection Act (HIPPA) that conveys legal protection to medical records that is similar to financial data. The database would be worth while in helping doctors make quicker and more accurate medical decisions and would also eliminate many drug interaction and allergy problems.