Obama health plan faces big obstacles

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- U.S. healthcare analysts say President-elect Barack Obama's plan to make medical records standardized and electronic faces big obstacles.

Obama wants to computerize all health records within five years to improve people's quality of care and ultimately lower healthcare costs.

Currently, however, just 8 percent of the country's 5,000 hospitals and 17 percent of its 800,000 doctors use the kind of record-keeping system Obama envisions for the nation, CNN reported Monday.

To make the plan work, serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed and tens of thousands of workers trained to build and implement the technology, said Dr. David Brailer, a former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology under the current Bush administration.

"Getting electronic records up and running is a very technical task," Brailer said. And expensive.

Obama's plan could cost as much as $100 billion during the 10 years it likely would take to implement such a program, said independent studies from Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund.