TRANSCRIPT: Hello, Dr. Keith Smith with you, Surgery Center of Oklahoma. Thank you for joining me in this video blog series.

Here’s scam #1, as promised. Let’s start with electronic medical records. You know, the state has such great ideas, they have to be mandatory. And this is no different. Electronic medical records actually have a place. A very limited place.

But the people who make these systems couldn’t make nearly the profits and money that they have made without the government mandating their use. That is exactly what happened. Votes and influence were auctioned off in Washington D.C. to see to it that these systems were mandated.

The government also wants all of your medical records. And that is very clear from the way that they have implemented what’s called ‘meaningful use’ where patient’s medical data is basically turned over to the bureaucrats in Washington.

None of this information in your medical record is nearly as secure once it’s digitalized because we read all the time about laptops full of patient information or big insurance carriers leaking information that’s confidential. Those stories are in the paper all the time.

Hospitals like electronic medical records systems for another reason. Big hospitals like it because these systems have become so expensive that the physicians who have thrown up their hands and decided they can’t afford them are much more likely to succumb to an offer that they can’t refuse – to become a hospital employee. This has driven a lot of physicians to hospital employment where they can be more easily controlled by the hospitals.

These electronic medical records systems were all about our safety so that all of your electronic medical records can be available to the ambulance or to the emergency room when you’re unconscious. It turns out none these systems communicate with each other, so none of that is true. All of these vendors consider their software proprietary so they do not work well with one another and in all likelihood, your information will not be known when you show up in the emergency room.

There are private vendors that will actually put your electronic medical records on a zip drive that you can carry with you on a necklace, for instance, so none of these systems really provide us any safety as promised. I remember Albert Camus’ famous quote: “The welfare of the masses is always the alibi of tyrants.” That’s what I think of when I think of these electronic medical records systems. As a physician, if you use these systems in a hospital, you’ve seen these huge records in which most of the pertinent information pertaining to a patient who is hospitalized is actually very difficult, if not impossible, to find. And I think that means these records are actually not as safe as the old fashioned paper ones.

Electronic medical records is a scam. It is nothing that we use here at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, and I think if you ask the vast majority of physicians, they would tell you they wish they did not have to use them. We will continue with this series and we’ll have another scam for you here very shortly.

Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.