CIO — We must face the reality that 76 million baby boomers are nearing retirement and consider how that will affect the future of health and health care. As the baby boomers age, they will begin to use the health-care system with greater frequency. And they will expect what they have always received: high quality at low cost.
The best way to continue this level of service and improve upon it is by harnessing the power of information technology. Up until now, however, the health-care industry has failed to utilize IT systems that could dramatically improve the safety of health care while lowering overall costs.
As every IT professional knows, the world in which we all live is replete with consumer-based expert systems that are handling millions of transactions every day in real-time. They operate seamlessly and are amazingly accurate. So accurate, in fact, that many consumers no longer get a receipt for their electronic transactions. As an example, look at gasoline purchases. Consumers are so confident that a gas pump anywhere in the country will be so fast that they do not even think about the two seconds it takes for the credit card to turn the pump on. They also believe that that same gas pump is so safe and accurate that they are willing to allow their personal financial information to travel through an electronic network to take money from their personal account. All from a gas pump.
Now, let’s contrast that with a health-care system in which sick patients are routinely expected to fill out multiple forms with the same information that they have been asked to fill out numerous times before. A health-care system in which the Institute of Medicine reports that we lose between 44,000 and 96,000 Americans every year due to medical errors—the equivalent of a New York to Washington airline shuttle full of passengers crashing every day, killing everyone on board. Our current health-care system tolerates 2 million hospital-induced illnesses a year. In other words, if you spend more than four days in a hospital, the chances are even money that the hospital will give you a disease that the hospital will then charge you to treat.
Today, there are 18 people in the health-care system for every doctor. Instead of paying the doctor to provide us with health care, we are paying the health insurance company to pay the doctor to pay the clerical people to determine what kind of health care the insurance company believes we are eligible to receive.
