We were somewhere around March on the edge of the spring when the reality began to take hold.
I remember saying something like, “Yes, I accept the offer with MedCity News and will start in early April, just before HIMSS.” Suddenly, there was a terrible roar around us and the CIOs were full of panic, all swooping and screeching and diving around the Internet, which was going about 100 gigabits per second with data flowing out toward China.
And voices were screaming: “Holy Big Panda! Who are these damn hackers?”
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Then it was quiet again.
But not for long. The hacks on health insurers big and small continued almost unabated; it was only May when one breach response company declared 2015 the “year of the healthcare data breach.”
The self-styled healthcare expert was only two months behind the Washington Post, which made a similar pronouncement in March, right about the time we learned that Premera Blue Cross had joined Anthem in having millions of records exposed to hackers. For that matter, another security firm called it in February, not long after the Anthem hack became known.
And the madness continued. CareFirst BlueCross Blue Shield, Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield and UCLA Health System all fell victim to malicious attacks, plus the Journal of the American Medical Association had to issue a “mega-correction” about an erroneous report on data breaches. Health data lapses even made their way into the fictional White House of HBO’s “Veep” this year.
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Not that hackers needed all that for the job, but once you get locked into serious medical data collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
Meanwhile, attorneys were busy transferring blame for EHR failures from healthcare providers to the government to vendors. The regulator-man watched them nervously.
“Say,” he said. “Are you fellas spending $30 billion of Uncle Sam’s money on EHRs that nurses hate and that won’t interoperate?”
“Just keep the damn money flowing and maybe roll back Meaningful Use,” the healthcare systems said. “We’re in a hell of a hurry. We’re on our way to an Accountable Care Organization.” So what if we don’t even know if EHRs are safe?
How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible s**t go on? How long can the public and the government tolerate the doom-struck craziness. This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the veins of the healthcare industry … small blue wires gone amok in front of our eyes, 20 and 30 years without interoperable health IT.
I tell you, my man, this is the Health IT Dream in action. We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.
(With apologies to Hunter S. Thompson.)
Photo: Bigstock