Electronic Health Records

The book I read to research this post was Electronic Health Records for Dummies by Trenor Williams et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Apparently britain is one of the leading countries in terms of converting health records to electronic means where in 2009 over 90% had been converted. An issue which does come up is what do you do with the old written records do you use them as a back up & do you continue to maintain them or do you shred them to make space & save money & then of course what do you use as a back up. Software which allows you to create & manage electronic health records typically costs $10,000 per practitioner or if you have it as a cloud computing solution is $500 per practitioner per month. My local doctors surgery did a deal where they get the software free but the company that supplies the software can use the general data. That means they won't have the data that ie a certain person has heart disease but ie they know what percentage have heart disease & what treatment they receive etc. A final point something mentioned in the book is google health which has been discounted but microsoft health vault which is more or less the same thing it's basically a patients repository. Also it's free. Particularly if somebody needs a lot of treatment it allows a patient online space where the patient & people that are treating the patient can leave notes obviously they can't put anything controversial down because the patient has got access to it but I thought what a good idea.