Last week, Great Britain announced that it is “dismantling” a government program aimed at making health care records available electronically. The objective of the program was to better facilitate communications between doctors, clinics, and patients. The program, which began in 2002, was budgeted at $19 billion to implement. As Dr. David J. Brailer, national coordinator for health information technology in the Bush Administration, notes to The New York Times, the breakdown was mainly due to a top-down re-engineering approach that was “forced upon physicians and nurses.”
The United States government is moving towards putting patient records online, but if an electronic patient records program is going to succeed in this country, program administrators need to have the cooperation of a wide variety of individuals throughout the organization. Ultimately, this is what makes the individuals feel as though they are key stakeholders in the outcome of the project. Involvment from other departments of the organization (i.e. legal, human resources, operations, etc.) will ensure that the program is comprehensive enough to sustain its overall objectives for the long-term.