From Truth Out: http://truth-out.org/news/item/14162-the-advent-of-national-electronic-health-records-a-potentially-risky-proposition-for-lgbt-populations
By Alissa Fleck
Saturday, 09 February 2013
Digitized health records may be a step forward for improving overall health care, but how will they safely and competently account for the medically and socially marginalized LGBT community?
Information sharing in medicine and health care is undergoing major changes in the United States, but if these changes are improperly managed, there could be devastating repercussions. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) populations – which already experience staggering health care inequalities – have the potential to be hit especially hard by these reforms.
In a 2009 survey conducted by Lambda Legal and its partner organizations, of nearly 5,000 LGBT individuals, 56 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual people and 70 percent of transgender people indicated they had at some point experienced discriminatory or substandard health care, highlighting the particular precariousness of their situation as well as the need for an overhaul of the current system.
Over the next few years, medical institutions nationwide will continue to implement Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in their facilities. The 2009 American Reinvestment & Recovery Act (ARRA) puts pressure on institutions to implement EHRs by way of Medicare and Medicaid payouts up until 2015, at which point institutions that have not shown quantifiable improvement of care with the use of EHRs are then penalized according to a percentage scale increasing yearly.
EHRs are digitized versions of a patient’s medical information, intended to replace the cumbersome, outdated paper charts currently prevalent in many medical practices, from doctors’ offices to emergency care centers. EHRs confer the benefit of a patient’s health information instantaneously anywhere it’s needed. An EHR can be created, updated and reviewed by authorized staff members across various health care organizations – one such record can aggregate information from multiple doctors, pharmacies, workplace clinics, medical imaging facilities and more.
What to include in an EHR seems commonsense to a degree. Age, ethnicity, allergies and medical concerns or past operations, for instance, are all relevant to efficient health care practices. However, how and whether to include other identifying information, such as sexual orientation and gender identity, and whether that information is in fact relevant at all, may not be so straightforward.
Continue reading at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/14162-the-advent-of-national-electronic-health-records-a-potentially-risky-proposition-for-lgbt-populations
