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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (6629)	4/8/2009 9:05:01 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

Yesterday I listened to a audio presentation from ReachMd XM 160. Heart Matters The Right Test at the Right Time: Progress in Cardiac Imaging Dr. Janet Wright, senior vice president for science and quality for the American College of Cardiology, hosts. Her guest is Dr. Robert Hendel, professor of medicine at Rush University Medical College in Chicago and past-president of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology. They have set up an intermediary computer system between the doctor ordering the imaging and the facility doing the imaging. They flag procedures that are "inappropriate," meaning, best I can tell, not cost effective, and give feedback to both parties. No one is yet stopping an ordered procedure or requiring the patient to pay more for it but you can see where the system might escalate to that down the line. In all these efforts you can see value in informing the participants that they are coloring outside the lines. But you can also see risk of heavy-handed enforcements of iffy standards.

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (6629)	4/8/2009 9:24:39 PM
From: skinowski	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

Thanks. I'll print this out and give it to some colleagues to read. Hospitals are going nuts over all those "guidelines" and stacks of "standing orders". Sometimes I spend more time trying to reconcile several of those pre-printed forms than I spend talking with the patient. And I'll still get a call from the Pharmacist about duplicate and overlapping orders etc. That's what I meant in my post a day or two back when I talked about the (stealthy?) push to computerize entire chunks of medical decision making. Would anyone here trust a computer program to manage all of their assets? I submit that a person's life and health are no less important.