New Vision Needed: Creative Entrepreneurially Driven Technologies Can Improve Health Care

Clearly our health care sector has lagged behind all others in using leading edge technologies to improve operations- vested interests have really not worried too much about costs; these were just passed on to consumers, directly and indirectly. But new tools and technologies are rapidly emerging in the health care sector and these are driven by emerging entrepreneurial firms rather than the traditional major players. No surprise here- statistics show more than 95 percent of all radical technology innovation in the past 60 years has been developed by SMEs (small medium enterprises) not major corporations as you might expect.   

Bolder options are needed now to address today’s health care problems – the prescription: deploying new technology and capital on global best practices.

Let me share a vision on the possibilities. Suppose we create a new national eHealth program. Program objectives are to commit to use leading edge information and communications technology to improve patient safety, accessibility and quality of care; enable patient mobility nationally and internationally; meet the increasing demands from our citizens and healthcare professionals; and use eHealth as the main tool for renewal and improvement of our nation’s health care services.

  

We will use telemedicine and other technologies to support creative, cost effective new solutions to improve our health care system. Consider some possibilities: 

Your patient records are stored as secure Electronic Health Records or ‘EHRs’. Just like your secure on-line bank account transaction records, you can access this information, identify issues, alert your practitioners, and if needed, request your EHR be sent to another physician or

 

Health Care Rx: New Technology and Creative New Ventures

In an October 11th interview, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D- Minnesota) noted we need to employ new technology to improve our health care system. In a letter I recently shared with the Senator, I emphasized that her comments were right on target and offered the following observations:

-- The health care sector has lagged behind all others in using leading edge technologies to improve operations- vested interests have really not worried too much about costs; these were just passed on to consumers, directly and indirectly.

-- We learned lessons years ago with the e-commerce revolution where companies replaced paper with electronic transactions. Moving from paper to electronic changes processes, creates new way of conducting business, and these are the real benefits. This point has been missed in much of today’s health care dialog.

-- U.S. hospitals are, by all measures, the most expensive in the world. About one-third of all private hospital expenses look like what you may expect in a hotel business – costs for check-in, room service, reservations, meals, cleaning and check out. Years ago I was involved in a major health care study which also reinforced the same points- not much has changed since. Hospital costs are the largest component of health care costs; administration and support costs are a major component of hospital costs- if we set the objective of reducing hospital costs by perhaps 5 percent and with proper incentives, we can achieve real measurable cost benefits. We are far behind the curve and should look at best practices elsewhere. In early 2009, I was invited to participate in an Israeli hospital management company which used Israeli logistics 'best practices' to optimize scheduling for all perioperative procedures to efficiently handle large patient volumes- these same new processes have excellent applications in US hospitals.