Source: Physician, wire thyself - The Practical Futurist - MSNBC.com
The American health care system has many problems, but one of them is at once obvious and generally ignored: most doctors and hospitals still work in the buggy-whip era of information technology, dependent on pen, paper and manila folders.
At the turn of this century, when the average industry was investing $8,000 per employee on computer technology, health care was spending $1,000. By now, if you belong to a frequent shopper club, your grocery store almost certainly has far more computerized data about you than does your doctor.
Why is this important? Partly because it wastes enormous amounts of money: the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology estimates that simply by using electronic health records we could save between 7.5 percent and 30 percent of the $1.6 trillion dollars now spent annually on healthcare. But beyond that, a fully computerized medical system will allow some remarkable new features and services for patients. And that doesn’t mean waiting for new breakthroughs — it can be done with the same information technology that almost every other business in the country has already adopted.
Observers increasingly suggest that the federal government — which already pays over 40 percent of the health care costs in the U.S. — needs to help solve both the funding and standards problems. Congress will look at several bills this fall that provide funds for pilot computerization programs and also require standards for any clinical equipment purchased with federal funds. But it will take more than that. In August a team of experts writing for the Annals of Internal Medicine estimated that a full national health information system could be put in place for about $156 billion. Although that sounds like a big number, it’s only two percent of current annual healthcare spending—and with the potential savings in the trillions, that’s a great return on investment. The current spending projection, however, is only a third of what is required.
There are clearly enormous social and political challenges involved in overhauling the American healthcare system, and so far progress has been slow. But with trillions of dollars in savings available simply by upgrading to the information technology that the rest of business takes for granted, perhaps it’s time for the health care industry to write itself a prescription for a major dose of new technology.
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