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Can Technology Cure Health Care?

A recent article in the WSJ talks about how measured improvements have not been achieved via the implementation of more technology within the health care field. This is something that I think spreads to pretty much every industry - the problem is that it's difficult to measure because you are essentially measuring against a moving target in many cases. Overall, the technology might be more expensive than writing everything down on paper. However - if everyone else is making technological advances, then by not doing so you then fall behind the industry, which ultimately may lose you customers. So in my view, companies have to adopt technology, and improvement is basically measured by your ability to survive.

Specific to health care, the article mentions:

One common complaint: The systems seem to give short shrift to improving patient care; they focus on administrative tasks such as making savvier use of complex billing codes for insurance reimbursement. "When you're trying to read the notes of your colleague [in an electronic record], it's almost impossible to figure out what happened to the patient," says Rushika Fernandopulle, an internist, instructor at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of consultant Renaissance Health. "You have to read through two pages of all this junk that's put in to increase billing."

This makes sense. Doctors know how to read each others' writing and don't necessarily need a software package to walk them through a diagnosis. (This may be changing, however, as health care becomes increasingly regulated - doctors may need to check off a certain number of criteria that will automatically relate to certain treatment, drugs, etc.). What the EMR primarily supports at this stage is billing and insurance issues. Since physicians don't have the time to go through everything, perhaps the solution is a process change within the office - could a medical billing specialist be trained in EMR functionality and enter information as dictated by the doctor? The article mentions "giving short shift to patient care", but I'm not sure if I agree with that. Current EMR functionality may not relate to patient care in the traditional sense, i.e. helping to improve health and lead to a correct diagnosis, but I think that overall it does improve patient care in the sense that patients are able to better utilize the benefits offered under their insurance plans, and physicians are able to better price their services to gain a more healthy profit for themselves as well as (hopefully) better pricing for their patients.

posted by Ashley @ 10:50 AM