Obama's plans boost electronic medical records firms

Macroeconomic guru Jim Rogers has a message for investors: The United Kingdom is finished.

Bloomberg quotes the bow tie-clad forecaster as saying that he "would urge you to sell any sterling you might have. It's finished. I hate to say it, but I would not put any money in the U.K."

But England isn't the only country Rogers is trashing. Reuters reports that Rogers is accusing the United States of a systematic effort to devalue the dollar by "turning on the printing presses." It's hard to argue with that and he went on to say that "The idea that you can fix a period of excess borrowing and excess consumption by more borrowing and more consumption to me is just ludicrous."

He reiterated his bullishness on China's long-term future even though that market has been hammered of late.

Regardless of whether you buy into his investment theses, it's hard to argue with his logic that borrowing and consumption will not lead out of a nightmare created by borrowing and consumption

but did you know there is a plan to ration healthcare through electronic medical records?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs

The future of medicine has some bright spots. One medical megatrend relates to the electronic health record. President Obama is aggressively pushing the electronic health record [EHR]. It will be a major improvement to medical care and to patient safety over time. But there are two major problems that need to be overcome before the EHR will ever be fully functional – interoperability and physician documentation. By interoperability I mean that each of the companies that produce the software do so in a proprietary manner. The result is that they cannot interact. So if a patient is discharged from one hospital today and goes to another hospital’s ER tomorrow, the information from the first hospital will likely not be accessible. This must change and it appears that the federal government is attempting to have standards established for all to follow. That will be a big improvement. There are issues however as to who should set the standards – government or a multidisciplinary working group. Either way, standards are needed.
The second obstacle is that physicians find that most of the current systems actually impede productivity rather than enhance it. This is because the software creators have not spent the time necessary to understand how physician work and are intent on making the document easy to manipulate by the computer. Here is an example. Say a doctor admits a patient with pneumonia. He or she might want to insert the following into the chart: “55 year old nonsmoking male, sudden onset of high fever, shaking chills, productive cough and pain at left lower chest with inspiration. Temp 103, pulse 94, BP 128/74, abnormal breath sounds and dullness to percussion in left lower chest. Chest X-ray shows infiltrate in left lower lobe and sputum exam shows gram positive diplococcic. Diagnosis – pneumococcal pneumonia. Treatment – antibiotic.” Sorry for some “doctor speak” but in essence this is a fairly classical description of a pneumococcal pneumonia. It takes about 30 seconds to say, the same to dictate and perhaps 60 seconds to write or type these words. But to enter it into the chart as per the dictates of the software takes much longer because it requires following a long branching tree of choices. You might liken it to using Word for a document that can be read later versus Excel for a spreadsheet that can be manipulated. Physicians really dislike the extra time it takes and the fact that it is not consistent with the way they “think” about the patient and his or her problem. So they rebel and will not adopt. But this problem, like interoperability, can be overcome.
Once these two issues are resolved, the EHR can become a reality, but not before.
How these issues will play out in growth of health information companies stocks is still be determined.
http://www.medicalmegatrends.com