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Some health-care costs hard to quantify

Friday, September 21 at 12:00 AM

By Sheila Carlon, Regis University

Earlier this week, New York senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appeared on early-morning talk shows to talk about her $110 billion health-care plan which, she says, would cover all Americans including the 47 million who are currently uninsured.

Many of us remember when Clinton attempted to “fix the health-care system” during her husband’s term as president. And we also remember the effort failed miserably.

The solution then was technology: a single claim for billing insurance companies and a system that would collect, save and transmit medical and health data. However, the systems that capture data, store it, utilize and report it are not as sophisticated and available as one might think. And in some small rural hospitals, the lack of such technology is startling. What they found across the country was startling to them but not to those of us in the “industry.”

Fast-forward to today and Clinton is again hoping to capitalize on technology in her “American Health Choices” plan.

She stated that she has been working for several years to support an electronic medical record system, which would save an additional $77 billion a year. She also stated she would require companies to compete on cost and quality without eliminating anyone from coverage.

But where does she get the $77 billion figure?

A recent white paper published on the Health Information Management Systems Society Web page (http://www.himss.org) reports that the return on investment from electronic medical records implementation has been difficult to quantify. In fact, while most hospitals have the requisite digital systems in lab, radiology and pharmacy, the mission-critical systems that would help prevent serious and costly medical errors are installed in less than 1 percent of all U.S. hospitals.

While there are initiatives at the federal level to lead the electronic health record charge, Bush appointee David Brailer left his position as the head of technology for health care after only a little
over a year in office. In parting, he referred to the lack of federal support for the health-care technology initiatives as long as the war in Iraq was continuing to consume such a large portion of the budget. His replacement, Robert Kolodner, is charged with running a new group that is to certify vendors in electronic health records and health-care information technology. This group, the American Health Information Community, was a governmental committee but is now going private and has no electronic health records vendors on board.

Whatever the result of the next presidential election, someone absolutely must understand and commit to health-care technology issues. These systems are costly to health-care providers and there must be some assurance that what they are getting will help them better manage patients and provide improved care using the best information they can possibly gather.

Sheila Carlon, Ph.D., teaches courses in electronic health records and health care technology in the Rueckert-Hartman College for Health Professions at Regis University in Denver.

READER COMMENTS

It's in the making . It's the SMART CARD. all your medical info in a card. Paperless.
It's the end times.

Posted by jl on September 26, 2007 08:17 PM

The feds already use fingerprint identification to identify criminals. why not tap that technology for medical records? as well as is if we tied the two entities together than crimes committed by persons with out a criminal record could be identified. we could sidestep the orwillian use of "chipping" everyone. Utilizing a web server dedicated to medical records, from Dentists, Doctors Nurses, to Pharmacists. Hospitals could avoid double billing and most of the paperwork. I see it as a way to create jobs insofar as data entry positions.

Posted by Froward on September 22, 2007 08:28 AM