Automating the medical practice--promise and peril.

Pick up any newspaper or news magazine and chances are that an article on health care reform will be prominently featured. While we await the details of the plans for reform, we can divine some major implications. With certainty, one of these will be the need to access and integrate vast amounts of patient and provider data. These medical data, in electronic form, will fuel the interplay between provider, hospital, government organizations, and private health care management. These data will be used: to drive the outcome studies that will examine medical resource consumption; to track prescribing practices; to facilitate patient follow-up; and to monitor wellness programs. In short, data management will be an unseen, but very present, companion to all our practice decisions. The successful medical practitioners in the coming era will be those whose practices have an electronic infrastructure that allows comprehensive medical record keeping, inclusive of patient charting, billing, coding, scheduling, and data reporting to third parties.