What Health Care Can Learn From A Cell Phone
By BRENT PARTON
Remember when you memorized phone numbers? Today with my cell phone holstered at my side, the only numbers I seem to remember are the ones I knew before I had a cell phone. I know this all sounds like one of those bank commercials with the serene sounding announcer but truth is, today the ways we communicate with each other and our surroundings have been profoundly changed by technology. Unfortunately these changes have largely not touched the healthcare “system.”
Recently while having a discussion about health care with a friend’s father, he reached into his wallet and pulled something out that caught my attention. It was a bright red piece of paper flimsier than a business card, smaller than a dollar bill that had several words on it. On the paper were the typed names of 5 different prescription drugs, one of the names at the bottom had even been scratched out and replaced with another handwritten one.
The paper was worn and frayed at the edges, in fact it looked like a piece of paper I used to carry around in my wallet – only that one had the phone numbers of friends and family – not the drugs I supposedly needed to stay alive.
Sure this is only one example, but a powerful one. My friend’s father carried the card because depending on the hospital or pharmacy he went to, he might need it to inform them of what prescriptions he was currently taking. The reason being is such information is often not shared amongst different providers in our fragmented healthcare system. We all know that in any industry knowledge is power, but in health care, knowledge is often the difference between life and death.
Our healthcare “system” is in actuality a series of different silos, each relatively disjointed from the next, with little horizontal integration between them. It is not that the health care industry doesn’t respect or simply can’t afford technology, walking through any hospital these days would speak to the contrary. In fact it turns out that many of the health care silos themselves are well integrated and tech savvy, within their respective silo. This vertical integration within specific hospitals, insurance companies and other health systems is actually quite advanced, however when it comes to “inter-silo” communication, they fall well short of what we need.
This is where we arrive at arguments for the potential savings that integration based healthcare IT can bring in addressing sky-high administrative costs (compared to other developed nations) and cutting down on costly (in economic and human terms) medical errors. Yet another compelling argument for greater integration is simply that you spend less time answering, “the 10,000 questions of health care,” before you are even allowed to leave the waiting room.
As is often the case with issues in health care, there are probably a million explanations (depending on who you talk to) for why we have so little system-wide integration. One however, is fairly intuitive given that the market largely governs the relationships between various health care silos. As an example, what incentive is there for two competing hospitals to share information? The answer should be to save lives and money for the system as a whole, but integration is an expensive undertaking and most likely the cooperation needed to accomplish it will need to be induced as a result of system wide reform.
The simple fact is that we have come too far with technology as a means of complicating our lives (remember when it was possible to not be available?) to not also let it make them easier and as efficient as possible. But it is important to remember that not only is integration possible today, it is also needed. The days of people living in one place, seeing the same doctor and using the same hospital for all of their lives are fading and the days of using paper for records ended long ago in most sectors of the society. As a sector where knowledge and time can affect someone’s well being, health care needs to get with the program.
Authored by Brent Parton, an Associate at SHOUTAmerica. Brent, a native of Santa Rosa, California, first came to Clayton Associates as an intern in May 2008 and became immediately involved in the project that would soon become SHOUTAmerica. Before coming on board, Brent spent the previous year teaching English in Shenzhen, China. He holds a B.A. from Vanderbilt University in History and European Studies and is currently pursuing his Masters in Public Policy from Vanderbilt as well.
SHOUTAmerica is a non-profit organization committed to cultivating sustainable solutions and policies that address today's healthcare crisis with a conscience for tomorrow.
