Dragging health records into the Digital Age

From CNet News: Dragging health records into the Digital Age.

Walk though a typical Kaiser Permanente doctor's office or hospital, and you won't find a paper chart lying around. Kaiser, with 450 hospitals and offices around the country, is almost entirely paperless.

But as the rest of the health care industry rushes to follow in Kaiser's digital footsteps, Kaiser's paperless success story--a 10-year, $4 billion effort--might actually serve as a cautionary tale.

By no means has the Kaiser e-health project failed. In fact, besides some hiccups, it has gone well: Kaiser said it has seen more satisfied patients and a slight dip in emergency room visits and hospital stays, which cuts costs. Even the doctors grumbling the loudest beforehand don't know what they would do if they were forced back to paper.

Unfortunately, the rest of the health care system looks nothing like Kaiser.

The article is a bit dramatic but it does touch on the various problems with implementing digital EHR broadly.  It is notable that most of the problems are not actually with the technology itself, they concern how to deploy it, new issues like access security that don't come up as much with paper records, and of course how to pay for the systems...