Vision

MEMRI envisions a system in which Michigan residents have their own private, secure, and complete electronic medical record (EMR), cutting at least $350 million a year from Michigan's healthcare costs while dramatically enhancing the quality of care.

Mission

• Alert and inform citizens, legislators, business leaders, and healthcare leaders about the seriousness of the present situation in healthcare and the options with respect to CPRs and EMRs;
  
• Address the key EMR-related public policy issues of privacy, healthcare costs, and healthcare quality;
  
• Catalyze consensus for action;
  
• Architect and implement pilot systems focusing on a specific high-need patient population (diabetics) to both concentrate the record requirements and demonstrate high-impact outcomes;
  
• Plan and facilitate the statewide adoption of the resulting solution across all patient populations; and
  
• Put patients in their rightful place at the center of the healthcare system-empowered with the tools to manage and control their own EMR
  

"The medical record is so thoroughly broken and dysfunctional today that...it actually doesn't work at all, hardly."* (Here's some evidence to support the claim.)

The technology exists to assemble and store patient records in computer databases as "computerized patient records" (CPR), and CPR systems are being deployed in some hospitals and physician offices.

The technology exists to assemble medical records from disparate CPRs and other healthcare databases and to make them accessible over the Internet.

The last piece in the puzzle -- how to make the assembled electronic medical record private and secure -- has been solved.

* Donald M. Berwick: "Implementing the 21st Century Health Care Chassis." Keynote address at AHSRHP 2002. Berwick was an author of the IoM's exposé of the ills of the healthcare system, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001.