Can Technology Fix the Health Care System?

I was surfing through my usual tech sites for the latest news when I came across an article on Wired News. It turns out Steve Case is not alone in the quest to fix the health care system. I guess I don't get what the big attraction for these guys are.... I know the US's health care system is messed up, but I'm not sure technology can fix all of the aches, pains and dysfunction in our current system. I don't get why they don't just join a major company's board or start a hip/trendy start-up....

Hello! I'm a Slashdot troll!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod me down.

-1, Troll

Thanks!
A Slashdot troll

If nothing else, it can help.

[cduffy]

I'm senior tech staff at a late-stage startup making an EHR product (consider my bias declared), and I have a fairly decent window into at least a few of the places where the healthcare system is broken.

• Overhead. Doctors need to hire transcriptionists and billing clerks to do work that could be largely automated. (Our product addresses this).
• Ease-of-use. Most of the EHRs on the market require an office to switch to a very low patient load for a very long training period. This makes migration to a product intended to improve communications and efficiency into an extremely expensive and cumbersome proposition. (Our product addresses this).
• Lack of communications (or standardized records formats). There are *some* standards (HL7 is what we use for integration with 3rd-party scheduling and billing systems where possible), but nothing widely accepted and comprehensive enough to be able to give a patient a flash drive with their complete medical history in a format any doctor's EHR product will understand. Worse, a lot of systems won't integrate with anything else without requiring the customer to fork out serious $$$ for the add-on functionality. (As just one small vendor, there's not so much we can do about this right now)

There are a bunch of other benefits that EHR vendors try to sell folks on -- automatic warnings about allergies, ability to guide the physician towards checking for symptoms that could indicate a serious problem, etc etc etc; I'm coming at this from the back-office geek point of view, though, so I really have no idea how significant these are in the grander scheme of things.

Is adding more expensive IT products magic fairy dust that'll make healthcare cheap? Of course not. But technology that's well-thought-out, well-implemented and sanely priced certainly can help to make healthcare less expensive -- and putting records in a portable format benefits everyone.

(That said, there's a lot of poorly-implemented technology in healthcare... but that's a topic for a different, much more anonymous forum).

Re:In Healthcare, where does all the money go anyw

[scottv67]

t goes towards $3000 worth of treatment given to an uninsured person, as the hospital is required by law to do.

Amen! Amen! I was wondering when someone was going to get around to posting the truth about how the insured pay for the services that are rendered to the uninsured. Health care organizations "give away" a certain percentage of their services to uninsured or under-insured patients every year. The fancy hospitals in the suburbs that generate a healthy profit are being used to support the hospitals that serve the inner-city population.

Re:In Healthcare, where does all the money go anyw

[Red Flayer]

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few dirty HMOs that were taking kickbacks from hospitals for over-billing

That's how HMOs work. Instead of kickbacks, they negotiate lower charges for participating medical organizations.

I got Lyme Disease again last summer. I received a bill for $700 for a doctor's visit and several lab tests; my HMO paid $220, and the doctor's office was trying to get me to pay the difference. Not being a moron, I called my HMO, and they got me on a conference call with the doctor's billing firm. As a participant in my HMO, he was not allowed to bill me the excess charges -- but if I didn't have insurance, that visit would have cost me $700.

The real reason those hospital visits cost so much is that people go to the ER when they have a dislocated finger or a bad sunburn, instead of seeing a GP the following day. Hospitals are overwhelmed by trivial medical problems, and all those doctors, nurses, PAs, and support staff cost a fortune, never mind the fact that we all have to pay for indigent care through increased regular charges to those who can pay.

McDonalds Retiree

[bobbuck]

That McDonalds Retiree would be quite comfortable if he didn't have to pay for all the B/S government assistance programs that you love.

Re:In Healthcare, where does all the money go anyw

[Spectre]

You may not have noticed, but hospitals make far more off of the uninsured than they do off those who are insured.

Look at an explanation of benefits for hospital treatment. If you have "good insurance", anywhere from 20-60% of the hospital bill is written off when insurance declares the amount charged to be higher than the industry established norm, then insurance pays their portion, and you pay whatever is left over. That "written off" portion neither you nor insurance pays for, the hospital just has to absorb the loss of income.

The uninsured can't look at their bill and declare a big portion of it as "too high", so they pay whatever rate the hospital wants to charge, or go bankrupt trying.