Healthcare Myths

Great post from Arthur Garson at Chron.com titled "Setting the Health Care Record Straight" - where he addresses some of the prevalent myths associated with the problems in the US healthcare industry

The myths as detailed:
1) There's no money - there is it's just wasted (by everyone)

2) New Plan = Government Run Healthcare - no they are not but they are trying to provide more universal coverage.

On the issue of "free" healthcare this is not a simple problem/solution - see the experience in Hawaii whose experiment in offering "free" healthcare to low income families has been suspended as it ran out of money after 7 months.

3) You can't Change it (third rail in politics) - as another poster pointed out there is now sufficient interest/incentive to fix the problems not least of all driven by the economic problems.... American has been and will continue to be an innovator. As a good friend of mine Dr Bruce Merrifield shared with me recently in a paper on global warming and Integrated Patterns of Civilization "about 90% of all recorded scientific knowledge has been generated over just the most recent 30 years, a knowledge base that will likely double again in the next ten years".

I am an optimist like Dr Merrifield and take the view "The current explosion of learning and experimentation now extends to all fields of knowledge with consequences for the future that may be incalculable and certainly under appreciated"

I have no doubt we will find solutions to these issues and many others - our rate of innovation and knowledge sharing is increasing daily and the world is full of latent genius. We just need the incentive and I think recent difficulties and the level of focus are helping provide a spotlight to focus our minds and innovations on solving these issues.

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.