Last month, Senator Clinton made a major presentation at New York Presbryterian on health care and information technology. This is promising, particularly since some Republicans, like Tommy Thompson, Secretary of HHS seem to be getting impatient that we move in this direction as well. Here's the prepared text of the speech.
Her goals are improved quality and enhanced affordability and accountability. Here are some highlights:
While we can boast the best medical advances in human history, it can sometimes feel like we also have one of the most complex and confused systems of health care. When provider, patients and purchasers, alike, look at our health care system it can seem fragmented, redundant, inefficient, and bureaucratic.
Anyone disagree?
What our medical system requires of providers is a little like asking pilots to routinely land planes without any information from the control tower.
Yup. I've said that myself. (Registration may be required.)
We need a better system so that physicians have at their fingertips all the information they need to do their job - including patient history, the latest research, drug interactions, and everything else they need. Clinical decision tools, like hand-held computers, exist that would allow doctors to pull up the latest research information immediately, right at the bedside.
Yes, but let's be careful to differentiate between the hardware and the software. Let's face it, these days the hardware is the easy part. We need to pay more attention to the wizard behind the screen.
She noted that the health care sector spends much less per employee on information technology than the rest of the economy.
She is proposing legislation to:
1. Increase research on quality of care.
2. Provide the public with standardized reporting to allow consumers to "relibly compare provider performance."
3. Build an information technology infrastructure that enables information sharing.
4. Enable patients and providers to get information in real time through telemedicine, secure e-mail, etc.
5. Move toward rewarding performance.
In principle, there's little to disagree with, especially with numbers three and four and their focus on information coordination and flows.
I can't wait to see the legislation.
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