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The Daily Tar Heel

Follow the leader: UNC Hospitals’ online medical records lead ?eld

UNC Hospitals has done an exemplary job leading the health industry in electronic records and should continue its hard work.

In 1991, UNC Hospitals launched a pilot program that is now the Web-based Clinical Information System — WebCIS.

It’s an Internet-based program that allows UNC doctors to transfer their paper patient records to electronic records.

Only recently has there been a nationwide call to digitize patient records. Politicians and health industry leaders behind the push hope to increase the health care system’s efficiency.

WebCIS has proved their hopes valid and serves as an example of the results that ingenuity, hard work and more than $20 million can yield.

The system allows doctors to view the medical history of a patient, and it ends the impracticality of constantly handing over paper charts as patients move from one department of the hospitals to another.

No doubt, there will be concerns about digital patient records in light of the recent breach of a Carolina Mammography Registry database at the UNC School of Medicine.

But UNC Hospitals has gone to great lengths to ensure the security of WebCIS.

When WebCIS is accessed at UNC Hospitals, it’s accessed behind the hospitals’ firewall.

As of May 2004, any authorized person accessing WebCIS outside the hospitals’ firewall is required to use encryption.

Now all UNC Hospitals needs to do to continue its leadership in this field is to share its expertise.

WebCIS has already been contracted out to a major computer company and will be sold at other large universities.

This contract is a step in the right direction.

The entire nation will have to move to electronic records by 2014 if one of the new health care bills being considered in Washington is passed.

Doctors at UNC Hospitals are already years ahead of that mandate. They should use their expertise to help and advise other hospitals in the transition.

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