Barack Obama has said that a national electronic health records system will be a priority in his first term, not just for streamlining workflow at hospitals and physician offices but to cut costs and improve the quality of health care...

According to an article in Computerworld, Obama's national health records system will be costly, daunting - but an electronic health records system could save the nation $300B a year. The author of the article, Lucas Mearian, states that:

Currently, only 25 %  to 35 %  of the nation's 5,000 hospitals use -- or are in the process of rolling out -- computerized order-entry and medical record systems, according to Dr. David Brailer, who served as President Bush's health information czar from 2004 to 2006. Full EHR systems include patient care order-entry systems and networks to share patient data between hospitals, primary care physicians and insurance companies, and to fill pharmacy pre\script\ions.

"It's a multiyear implementation. Hospitals will have to make a sizable, potentially multihundred-million dollar budget commitments," Brailer said. "But the $100 billion is a one-time cost over the course of a decade. That's in an industry that spends $2.2 trillion a year now and 10 years from now will spend $3.7 trillion per year. So it's a relatively small amount of money."

Brailer said the nation stands to save between $200 billion and $300 billion a year once an EHR system is in place by cutting down on duplications, reducing errors that generate expensive care later, avoiding fraudulent claims and better coordinating care between primary care doctors, hospitals and specialists. The idea is "just to create a more efficient workflow," he said.

Read the whole article here.