Ignoring mountains of evidence showing that electronic medical records will not save our health care system any significant amount of money, our new President is still promoting EMR as a panacea.

This is becoming too much even for some of the people who voted for him. Doctors Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, for example, are so irritated by this BS that they wrote the following in the WSJ:

We need the president to apply real scientific rigor to fix our health-care system rather than rely on elegant exercises in wishful thinking.

In addition to pointing out that EMR won’t save the money projected by the Obama administration, Groopman and Hartzband also point out that the technology does not, as is also claimed, improve quality of care:

In a study of orthopedic surgeons, those using handheld PDAs had seven times as many errors as their paper-based cohorts.

A study of 15,000 heart patients found EMRs produced little improvement in the quality of care.

A study of 1.8 billion ambulatory care visits found EMRs produced no improvement in the quality of care.

Unfazed by all of this, Dr. Obama is still peddling his EMR snake oil. I guess he figures that the “news” media will aid and abet him in the fraud, and the Hopium eaters are too stoned on “change” to notice.