A few years ago while coming back from Guatemala, I was mistaken for a terrorist or high-level drug dealer – it was never clear which one I was supposed to be. Taken aside from the rest of the passengers after we landed in Houston, I was forced to wait in a security area with a rather nervous man who insisted he was the innocent owner of a “coffee farm” in the Guatemalan highlands. Agents X-rayed all of my bags several times, opened them up and removed the lining of my suitcases to look for secret compartments. One agent even began reading aloud pages from a novel I was carrying, apparently looking for clues.

Meanwhile, other investigators had printed out what appeared to be the past five years of my air travels, and asked me what I was doing in all the cities I had visited. I explained myself, they realized their mistake, and I was on my way. But note what they were able to do with the push of a few buttons: summon up my entire flight history for the past half decade.

What if that ready access to a main repository of data were possible in medicine, but instead of tracking travelers you could look at patients, seeing the history of their medications and procedures? For the past 10 years, Dr. Emad Rizk has thought something similar was possible, and he thinks one good way to realize such a system, at least at a facility-by-facility basis, would be to break down the wall between physicians and payers.

“The payers have claims, the providers have clinical medicine, and the two shall not meet,” he tells DOTmed Business News. “But if we connect in to the payers, that will be a huge step forward.”

Rizk, a physician and the president of McKesson Health Solutions, envisions a system that would, in effect, let physicians benefit from the rich historical clinical information contained within claims data, while also allowing better administrative decisions by embedding payer rules.

The potential clinical benefit comes from the nature of claims. When you visit a doctor’s office or hospital, claims are generated by almost every procedure, test and prescription. And giving providers point-of-care access to retrospective claims is, in many ways, like giving an airport cop a quick computer record of a flight itinerary.

“They see in my record all my drugs I’m on in the claims system,” Rizk explains. “They see everything in the last five to 10 years. It makes it easier. In the old days, when patients used to come to me, I had to figure out [their medical history] on my own.”

“All of a sudden, if you have all that information at the point of care, you can make a more data-driven and comprehensive decision,” he adds.

In a recent white paper, Rizk sketched out a possible system, suggesting it would be a cloud-based one, working on servers that give joint access to payers and providers. He thought the costs for setting up the system might, potentially, even be borne jointly by insurance companies and health care facilities, or even by competing payers, willing to put aside their rivalries because of the benefits such a system would bring.

Processes are important, too

But Rizk is careful to stress that the technology is not a panacea. Any system, even one that realizes the 10-year goal of uniting payer and provider systems, is only as good as the processes that go along with it.

Rizk illustrates this with a story. Not so long ago, he took his mom to the emergency room at the Chicago hospital where he used to work and which had recently made a fuss about going “paperless,” with every department connected by fancy electronic systems. The woman in the ER who received Rizk’s mom asked her a series of questions: her name, what complaint brought her to the ER (abdominal pain), and so forth. Rizk’s mother was then passed along to another woman, who was actually standing right next to the first one, and who asked the same questions. Eventually, she was sent to triage, where — you guessed it — she had to answer the same questions yet again. It took about six hours to eventually get a CT scan, a less than 5-minute procedure that Rizk said could have happened right away.

“The ER became paperless but they didn’t change the process,” Rizk explains. “It’s just not technology that’s going to solve everything. There are process changes, operational changes. Technology’s not going to wave a magic wand and (solve everything).”