Politics and party lines aside, it’s tough to debate the need for improvement in the current state of US healthcare. After all, the World Health Report 2000, Health Systems: Improving Performance, did rank the US health care system as 37th. In the world. Trending downward. 

According to “Ranking 37th — Measuring the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine, “the conceptual framework underlying the rankings proposed that health systems should be assessed by comparing the extent to which investments in public health and medical care were contributing to critical social objectives: improving health, reducing health disparities, protecting households from impoverishment due to medical expenses, and providing responsive services that respect the dignity of patients.” 

In an effort to keep everything copasetic, I’ll avoid a deep discussion here about the recent Supreme Court decision on the Obama Administration’s Affordable Care Act. Instead, I’ll state something we can all agree on—the importance of creating electronic versions of all patient information and medical records, i.e., an electronic medical record (EMR). In fact, this was one of the few issues that both Republicans and Democrats agreed upon. In this case, health data = gold.