Health Care Billing and Electronic Medical Records – My Pre-2019 Forbes Articles

Our health care billing system is a mess. Overhead in most countries for health care is 5% to 15% and a big reason for that is they have one type of health care system with simplified billing. Our convoluted and inefficient billing system significantly adds to our costs and is the reason we have overhead of 25% to 30%. If we could reduce our overhead to 15%, we could easily save enough money to provide basic primary care, dental care, and mental health care for everyone in this country. This series of articles from my Forbes blog outlines my old yet still relevant articles on the problems with our billing system and electronic medical records.

Health Care Billing: Can We Tame The Monster? – This article describes the many issues with our health care billing system.

Obamacare: Does It Tame The Billing Monster? –  I describe the perfect billing system and what the Affordable Care Act does to improve our billing system. Although those provisions were a step in the right direction, they fell far short of the ideal. And now looking back eight years later, the changes in billing were never effectively implemented. Blame the politicians for this one for fighting over the ACA instead of fixing it to make it work.

The Medical Record (R)evolution –  How we missed the boat on two potential uses of a well-designed electronic medical record – research and clinical decision support systems.

Future Mr. President, promise me this: One great single EMR for All –  Eisenhower gave us the highways and Kennedy got us to the moon. I dream of a president that will give us one nationalized electronic medical records built around patient care. I wrote this during the Obama/Romney election – I should have titled it Future President and left off the Mr. Future President. I’m grateful we might see a female president in my lifetime.

I’m sure I’ll write about this more in the coming years. Stay tuned… and always happy to take ideas.