Michael Burgess: “Let me just point out, though, one aspect of the Federal Government's involvement in electronic medical records and one…”

“Let me just point out, though, one aspect of the Federal Government's involvement in electronic medical records and one of the reasons we have to be so careful. When I said earlier that the Congress, being a transactional body, can sometimes be the enemy of transformation, a year ago a lot of us heard stories about some difficulties out of Walter Reed Hospital here in the city of Washington, DC. And I traveled out to Walter Reed and visited that Building 18, and indeed, there were some significant problems. But the young man who showed me around Building 18, Master Sergeant Blades, said, You know what's really, really at the heart of a lot of this frustration is that my guys here on medical hold have to go through their medical records. They will go through this long arduous process of compiling their record, yellow highlighting the important features, all done on paper, and that will be delivered to someone's desk where it sits for 2 weeks and then gets lost, and they've got to start all over again, which increased the frustration to be sure, but also increased the time that these young men who were at Walter Reed on medical hold trying to decide whether they went back with their unit or whether they were going to be discharged and cared for in the VA system, while all of that was sorted out, the paper record did indeed seem to be an impediment to that process.”