[LINK] Unfulfilled Promises Of Health Information Technology

[Jan Whitaker]

At 09:07 AM 14/01/2013, Tom Worthington wrote:

>An inter-operable health IT system might be good for patients, insurance
>companies and governments paying the bills, but what
>incentive is there for doctors and hospitals to implement it?

Incentives is one thing of a VERY complex social information segment. 
You're right about the problem with the benefits being unbalanced and 
in different pockets -- cost versus convenience versus accuracy 
(which is filled with assumptions) and input work, not to mention 
security, granularity of access, etc etc.

The answer to incentives has been handled by increasing the medicare 
imbursement for those health practitioners that join up. That was 
easy, although expensive. The harder one to solve is the DISincentive 
of the attention to medico-liability for the cases of incomplete or 
withheld records, trust in the source/accuracy of the information, 
managing sign-on accounts versus who should really have approved 
access, exposure of full records, etc etc etc.

The first part of the quoted bit above should be heavy on the 'might'.

The Australian "system" is in place, sort of. It was launched, sort 
of (much of it a Potemkin village). It's definitely a social 
experiment that still has yet to play out for HUGE amounts of 
dollars. Original budgets were way off. My estimate a few years ago 
was that by the time the thing was up and running (if ever), the bill 
would have come to around $3billion. I think it's just at or over $1bil now.

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

_ __________________ _