HBR has a really great article on reducing the cost of medical care and they hit on a few topics that are close to what I am working on and becoming passionate about. We all know that medical care is messed up and spiraling out of control – even with government intervention. This hit me like a brick lately with a visit to the doctor. I romantically took my toe nail off in a moving accident and it got infected. So as any traveling consultant does, I went to urgent care over the weekend. The clinic/system I went to had my last visit in 1987. No kidding. Oddly, I was there just over a year ago and they had no clue.
But because I am a random visitor to clinics, only visiting my primary care clinic for routine care, only I know that I have been on a lot of antibiotics this year – from the simple bee sting gone wrong to a serious bronchial infection. So as part of my visit they offered/prescribed a z-pack which is a very high dosage of antibiotics to kill those pesky dirty buggers that cause infections. I kindly declined explaining my medical history with anit-biotics.
http://hbr.org/
To get closer to a point relating to technology, I began to think about what I am doing – working for a client that improves health outcomes through better data and reporting. I used to watch Private Practice which really brings the essentials of total cost of care – caring for the total episode as opposed to the micro-episode. They had it right. A group of practitioners who collaborated on a total health outcome that maybe in the vacuum of their world may have seemed more intense and therefore more expensive. It isn’t.
But the gap identified in the HBR article is the lack in connecting the dots in medical care. Companies like Premier Healthcare Alliance take data and allow hospital systems to collaborate with other systems, benchmark and through accountable care communities and other collaboration tools to create better outcomes through something as simple as taking purchasing data, combining that with clinical care outcomes to decrease costs – the total cost of care decreases and the patient value and outcome is greater.
ACO (accountable care organizations) could be one of the only great outcomes of a government dictate – albeit the VA has been doing this for a great while. Premier is using tools like IBM Initiate to create a single patient view through finding subtle commonalities in EHRs (would have fixed my last record update as 1987) and Connections to extend professional communities across healthsystems, Cognos to provide real time reporting and alerting that allows health professionals to make almost predictive health decisions and much more.
It’s a great time to be in healthcare and technology because together we are creating a framework for better outcomes, better lives and true savings. At the end of the day, not often does one get to reflect on their daily toils and realize that what they are doing is for a mission that directly impacts on saving lives, creating better outcomes for practitioners and patients and also saving some money at the same time. This process certainly isn’t easy nor is it out of reach for teams who are willing invest in such a mission and outcome based care. This can only be done with the thoughtful combination of data, collaboration and deep resource knowledge of healthcare inputs – something we are doing very well for clients but even better – for the betterment of humanity. This is why I do IT.
