The University of Texas Health Science Center has just been awarded two federal grants totaling $30 million to help regional care providers implement electronic health record systems and make them user friendly.
"We want, through this funding, to make electronic health records as easy to use and learn as online banking systems," says UTHealth Dean, Dr. Jack Smith.
Currently 80 to 90 percent of all medical records are stored on paper. The goal is that have an electronic health record for everyone in the U.S. by 2014.
Electronic health records are expected to greatly reduce the number of medical errors, which is significant. Each year in the United States, as many as 100,000 people die in hospitals because of such errors. That's the equivalent of one major airline crash every single day of every single year.
Kaplan, a professor at the U.T. Health Medical School, says he wished electronic records were available when he had to get a pacemaker implanted during a trip to New Mexico.
"If my physicians here could have immediately gotten online and pulled up all of this information, it would have saved a lot of trouble on their part. A lot of trouble on my part," says Kaplan of his pacemaker.
