A user proposes a national electronic database for patient medical records to enhance healthcare quality and potentially reduce costs. The key benefit highlighted is making medical records easily accessible to various hospitals and doctors, while acknowledging the need to address privacy concerns.
This was proposed to lower healthcare costs, or at least to slow down the frequent increases of health insurance costs. If there was an easy way for doctors and medical staff to access a patients electronic medical record, how much would that reduce costs, or at least free up time for doctors and healthcare staff? To me, it looks that in the current situation, it could be one of the biggest improvement in healthcare quality. Currently, most medical records of patients aren't easily accessible to different hospitals or doctors. If there was a national electronic record of patients medical data, this could speed up things by a lot. But of course, privacy concerns could be a reason against it. Any Swiss doctors (or anyone knowledegable about the Swiss healthcare system) here who could comment about that? Do you think this could be a big improvement? Is this likely to become reality in the coming years?