centralized health care system

I have been thinking of several items but never found time to write down here. Today I make myself to put down and probably very soon on the items I thought about in the recent past.

Today I read an article in Bangalore Mirror, on "I so want to go back" and the things mentioned are so true! I feel those every day of my stay after the return. Some things like cycling (balance part) and swimming which can't re-learn in your life. Staying abroad brings a kind of awareness that it is very difficult to through away and get used to "home conditions" :-(

My six year daughter got sick a week ago and the symptoms started when I was about to start on a business trip. I thought she would be okay and my wife would be able to manage. Of course it did not happen that way and daughter got hospitalized and things became worse and cut short my trip and returned home. Daughter had certain problem and it had happened before a year ago. Due to several reasons we visited different hospitals. What happened was it is most of the time we have to tell doctor what had happened and what was diagnosed then. There is no centralized system which keeps such information. The way the hospitals and individual consultants organized, I don't see some kind of organized setup coming up in anytime future. Other possibility I can think of is user maintaining soft copy with some kind smart card (with built in memory). This also needs an interface where hospitals can enter data into it and hence not possible in near future. This smart card brings to another topic what is happening to this nation identity card, what it can be used, what can be stored, how credible it is, etc. Only time will tell. And will we ever hit social security?

Another thing is incentives model. I am somehow afraid of visiting dentist. I have some fear they always propose some treatment which brings them some revenue. And again no centralized data, and sometimes the xrays and such would be kept by the hospitals to keep stickiness to their operation, sometimes to make sure that records are kept safely, sometimes ignorance. But we usually loose the information we change the doctor, which otherwise could have been very useful.

Probably I have skewed the information to more negative way, but I feel there is a scope for improvement in the over all system! Of course meeting privacy rules is other topic for such a centralized system.