Electronic Medical Records Proved Their Worth in Katrina's Wake

Mar. 23 -- THURSDAY, April 26 (HealthDay News) -- As the skies darkened over New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina unleashed her fury in August 2005, Scharmaine Lawson, a nurse practitioner, grabbed a T-shirt, some underwear, a toothbrush and her Palm Pilot, and headed out of town.

Unbeknownst to Lawson at the time, that small hand-held device, grabbed almost as an afterthought, would end up spelling the difference between life and death for some victims of this country's most devastating natural disaster.

In it, Lawson had stored basic medical records for all of her 100 homebound, elderly patients, most of them also indigent and disabled and living in New Orleans and surrounding parishes.

Electronic medical records refer to a patient's medical records when they're stored on a computer and accessible from different locations. Health practitioners and medical institutions around the United States are starting to adopt them, but they're still far from commonplace.

An estimated 25 percent of office-based doctors in the United States reported using fully or partially electronic medical record systems in 2005, the most recent statistics available. That represented a 31 percent increase from the 18.2 percent reported in a 2001 survey, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

But electronic records certainly weren't the norm in New Orleans prior to Katrina.

Lawson's physical office in New Orleans was destroyed under 5 feet of water. "We lost everything. Papers were stuck together and full of mud. Nothing could be retrieved," she said.

Lawson at least had her Palm Pilot. Others weren't so lucky. Doctors' offices and hospitals around the city experienced the same waterlogged nightmare, losing patient records permanently.

As Dr. Jay Brooks, chief of hematology/oncology at Ochsner Health System in Baton Rouge, La., pointed out, paper medical records are heavy, and most are stored in a basement or ground floor of a building. "All the records were easily sitting in foul-smelling water for three weeks," he said. "They're all lost."