| I'm always trying to be the devil's advocate, also to my own thoughts. One approach could be, to answer this question: What would the benefits be, to put a lot of money into health care IT? Denmark actually did that. We spent an insane amount of money into creating a lot of different EHR/EMR/whatever systems, and most of the money is lost. However, we do have about 100% electronic healthcare records with GPs, 100% electronic pharmacy systems for GPs, and a very high EHR coverage in hospitals, probably 90-99%, and we have 100.0% coverage of patient administrative systems, of course. Some of the products have emerged as viable on the international market, and the companies behind these products (including CSC, IBM) are now trying to sell these systems internationally. If they succeed, the investment actually made sense based on a simple ROI calculation, but the investors (taxpayers) will not be the ones to harvest the return. If USA does the same, there will probably be more return to the taxpayers by creating jobs. However, it takes many years to create good health care IT systems. |
