Waiting for the Roof to Leak

The best thing we can do to rein in health-care costs is to invest in keeping people healthy instead of waiting for them to be sick or injured. For example, if someone is very obese and is at risk of getting diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and back pain, a doctor cannot be reimbursed for helping them lose weight in the Medicare system -- the patient must be diagnosed with a disease first. That's like saying that we wait until the roof leaks and ruins our living room furniture before we repair a hole in the roof. It costs more to wait longer.

We also need to pay an integrated care team for getting a good result, not for activity. Most manufacturing companies used to pay workers by the piece until they discovered that piecework produced a high volume of defective parts or products. Today, we pay doctors and hospitals more based on the volume of work they do, not its quality. That has to change.

There's a lot of waste because we do not transfer medical records information. Think about ATMs today vs. what you had to do 35 years ago. At that time, you either had to have a bank account everywhere you lived, worked or traveled, or you had to buy expensive travelers checks and convert them to cash. Today, you can go to any bank machine and get cash, no matter where your bank account is.

Medical records are where cash withdrawals were 35 years ago. The technology is available to achieve the same ease of use of medical records as we have with bank debit cards, but the government needs to bring everyone together and drive for transferable electronic medical information.

By Michael Critelli  |  July 20, 2009; 11:10 PM ET  | Category:  Electronic medical records , Health Care Reform , Health costs
Share This: Technorati | Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook
Previous: One Small Step/One Giant Leap | Next: We Must Threaten the Status Quo

The comments to this entry are closed.