Electronic Medical Records

Electronic Medical Records

Las Vegas is hosting a convention focused entirely on electronic healthcare records this week.
The HIMSS-2012 conference has 35-thousand attendees. HIMSS stands for "Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society". More than one-thousand exhibitors are showing everything from high-tech laptop carts, to entire office systems.
Dr Farzad Mostashari is the Obama administration's point man for healthcare information technology. He will be in town to give the keynote address.
Doctors' offices must eventually make the switch to electronic records, as a way to better share treatment plans and so on, and patients should one day be able to look at their own records online.
Some people worry that electronic records will put one's personal medical information at risk. Experts argue, the records should actually be safer.  

A scholarly article from 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine:
http://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/res/5efdc3a3-f9ec-4793-bb73-cebbd8fd1c1b/use+of+EMR+in+US+hospitals+NEJM+march+2009.pdf

What is HIMSS?
http://www.himss.org/ASP/index.asp

The administration's point man for electronic healthcare records:
http://healthit.hhs.gov/portal/server.pt/community/organizational_description_/1249/farzad_mostashari,_md,_scm/18220