Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: dybdahl who wrote (18332)	7/12/2010 6:34:13 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

I think that your perception of IT in American health care is skewed. Of course. As is yours. These are the systems I work with day in and day out, for the last 20 years or so. So, obviously, I am biased. I think we can do better, and should. But we have radically different parameters from what you would see in your country. What brings about "efficiency" in your country is totally different here, because the problems are different. In our case, our focus has been on medical payments for some time because that's where the biggest efficiency gains could be had. Today, that's "handled", so we've moved on to other, less productive tasks. Here, we have massive infrastructure dedicated to keeping people OUT of medical records, rather than on giving people unfettered access. You can argue that that's a bad thing caused by our way of life, but many Americans value that way of life highly, so we can't just ignore it. Keep in mind, American IT is far ahead of the rest of the world in practically every field (although less so than, say, 10 years ago). Walmart has, without question, the best inventory and distribution systems in the world. The systems that make this possible are pretty much all American innovations. Boeing has, for years, had CAD/CAM systems that allow its designs to go to machining as quickly as a file can be copied. So, we're not new to this business. The reason hospitals have been slow to adopt IT is that the savings simply hasn't been there to make it worthwhile. Even today, we have to have government giving money to providers in order to make it fiscally responsible to spend the money. In short, the efficiency savings just aren't there in many cases. Larger hospitals can leverage the investment. Smaller ones are getting there. No, but IT itself is not a solution to anything. Socialist health systems monopolize, and are therefore able to connect the dots in their data with almost 100% data coverage. I didn't intend to say that this gives a better data quality, but it gives more (bigger amounts of) interconnected data. And as Google keeps saying: More data is often better than finding intelligent ways of digging into them. One must differentiate the term "information" from "data". Data, in quantity, is of little value. Information, well, that's something different. I'd rather have a little information than a lot of data, as a general principle. I have evaluated several hospital's IT systems, and many ICUs have more than 10 different IT systems that they need to log into, in order to manage/edit their data - this is bad for data quality. I agree about this being a problem, and this problem is everywhere. But that is what HL7 is about, and ultimately, is a standards-based approach to solving the problem. I can't say about its adoption in other countries, but we're using it quite a bit. Unfortunately, the conversion of these standards to code takes time and money. Even worse, many of these IT systems do not provide an overview, they are basically like modernized versions of health IT anno 1990. It's really awful, and prevents a lot of efficiency gains. I can't say I see this any more than is typical of large scale systems. Some of the inefficiency I see in airline systems or even fast-food restaurants is astonishing to me. I'm certain hospital systems are no exception.