Political Comparisons of 2008 Presidential Candidates Heathcare Proposals

Now we are down to two candidates (or at least today we are down to two presumptive candidates) it is good to see where they stand on healthcare (props to Mr HisTalk for the pickup)

You can see a side by side comparison here

Both contain good ideas but the cost containment concepts make for interesting reading and will be important as the industry starts to address the soaring costs associated with delivering healthcare to our existing population and the burgeoning number of over 60's.....

Invest $50 billion toward adoption of electronic medical records and other health information technology.

Good to see some level of realism of investment needs to make this happen

Promote competition among providers by paying them only for quality and promote use of alternative providers (e.g., nurse practitioners) and treatment settings (e.g., walk-in clinics in retail outlets).

Provide consumers with more information on treatment options and require provider transparency regarding medical outcomes.

Require hospitals and providers to publicly report measures of health care costs and quality.

And for the cost and quality measures it will be essential to build in the collection, capture and reporting of this information as part of the normal clinical work flow, not as some after thought or adjunct process. Once again the concept of capturing clinical data directly from the clinician represents an efficient method of gathering data especially if this can be done in real time or near real time without any additional burden on the already over stressed and time pressured clinician. Once this information is captured it needs to be held in a form that can be transmitted to other systems in both human readable form as well as computer readable data that requires little or no human intervention to populate clinical database that can then use and report on this data.....Clinical Document Architecture for Common Document Types (CDA4CDT) does just that.