Electronic Medical/Health Records: The Looming Information Overload

Here’s an interesting article describing the data-management travails of banking, securities, financial services and technology company executives. Corporate data volume is doubling every two years. Keeping track of it all and handling discovery in the course of litigation is turning out to be a major issue.

Over in the health care industry, electronic information overload at the point of care continues to be an annoyance for individual physicians, who have trouble managing and reconciling electronic prompts during a patient visit. And if you think fixing the human-electronic record interface is easy, think again.

Well, not only do individual physicians have a vexing problem with visit-to-visit data overload, this article warns us that the medical industrial complex and its love affair with the electronic medical/health record is headed for the same problem at a ‘macro’ level. The sheer volume of patient data will not only result in storage and mapping needs, its complexity will make it more difficult to sort out what is important versus merely data versus a key piece of evidence in future litigation.