Among the reforms suggested for health care in the near future is electronic filing of medicalrecords combined with standardised coding of treatments.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that this statement could have been made any year after 1983, when the GRace Commission noted it. It was made in ‘91 when it was observed that with all the compiuterisation in place 12% or so of heath care costs wdre not in paperwork–but in the variances of paperwork. That is, 11% could have been knocked off health care costs by a presidential order that all health care insurers, providers, etc, use the same code sheets as medicare.
If an I-phone can take pictures of an infimite number of drunken tongus sticking out of or into an endless number of mouths, can it take pictures of care being provided, with date/time stamps so that audit records can be digitised?
If FaceBook can let someone throw a virtual beer bottle 12k miles, can aetna or BlueCross get a scrip sent by email the th standard cost of an email?
About 10 years ago there was a ticker–pill–that said yes.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=PILLQ.PK
as a nasd stock it used to float the 8 mark….
what does this tell us?
That the profit margin oputweighs any attempt at patient care. The margins for hospital admins to markup make honest answers unlikely, espcecially when th burden of "cost" could be shifted to government.
How serious is this problem?
The Physicians’ Foundation, founded in 2003 as part of a settlement in an anti-racketeering lawsuit among physicians, medical societies, and insurer Aetna, Inc., mailed surveys to 270,000 primary care doctors and 50,000 practicing specialists.
The 12,000 answers are considered representative of doctors as a whole, the group said, with a margin of error of about 1 percent. It found that 78 percent of those who answered believe there is a shortage of primary care doctors.
More than 90 percent said the time they devote to non-clinical paperwork has increased in the last three years and 63 percent said this has caused them to spend less time with each patient.
Eleven percent said they plan to retire and 13 percent said they plan to seek a job that removes them from active patient care. Twenty percent said they will cut back on patients seen and 10 percent plan to move to part-time work.
What do you think about the chances that such an elegant reform: one code book, ssl2 encrypted pda with camera, transportable records on the fly will get thru the feeing trough of congress? Leave a comment, and let’s discuss.
Posted under business
This post was written by admin on November 18, 2008
