There has been a lot of news recently about a national health record being able to display a patient record for the clinicians if someone appears in a hospital.

The example that is cited the most is someone appears unconscious at an emergency room at a hospital when they are out of town.  The system pulls up their medical records even though they haven't been there before.

This scenario depends on three factors occurring:

1. The patient is out of town.
2. The patient has an event that causes them to go to the emergency room.
3. The patient arrives unconscious and without family or without some sort of medical information on them.

While I’m sure this example does happen, it would not be the norm; it would be an aberration.  I would think that patients who have serious conditions like heart problems would take some medical information with them when they travel in case something happens.  Or at least they would be with family members who know what their medical issues are.  They would probably have their medications with them when they travel even if they don’t have them in the emergency room.

This scenario is very dramatic and compelling but would not occur often enough to justify the expense the time and effort to create these systems.  The scenario that should be targeted to improve would be the day to day flow of medical data in a health system.  Patients are asked to complete similar paperwork with similar pieces of data each time they visit a new location in a health care system, physician office, emergency room, surgery, etc.  Fixing this problem would save more expense and improve more patient care than the unconscious patient appearing in a out of town ER.