Yes, you read that right. ObamaCare is officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Whether it’s necessary or not for our country and how Congress will or will not change it is another discussion for another day. Let’s focus on how Obamacare can save your life.
PPACA promotes EMR, where medical records are stored electronically and parts of the file will be available to doctors elsewhere. That can be a life-saving feature if you ever travel.
For example, suppose you are a patient in California and you’re traveling to New York. You get sick and wind up in a doctor’s office. You have to tell him what you think you have as far as health conditions, hoping you’re getting that right. You then try and remember all the prescriptions you have that you hope you get right. Then you may have left off an X-ray or two that you’ve left back in California that may actually help the doctor diagnose the condition a lot more efficiently if he had all that
information.
If you were able to have your electronic medical records pulled up in the New York doctor’s office, he would have an informed and
accurate diagnosis for you within a few seconds. In his office, he would be able to see all your medical history, prescriptions, X-rays, blood tests and workup. The doctor will have thorough info to determine what meds to prescribe. Without this, he could end up giving medication that would probably be a detriment, which is what happened to Heath Ledger.
Heath Ledger had four or five doctors working with him...giving prescriptions that weren’t really recognized by other doctors. So they would be giving him medications that were actually contradicting the other medications that were prescribed. EMR permits a central database of your health and that is what your primary doctor would maintain. This is just like having the fingerprints on file. Once you’ve got your fingerprint on file, caregivers can see it. It’s the same thing we need to be able to do for doctor records.
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