Dell Takes Health Care Online

abb_road writes "Dell will announce today that it will begin offering employees an online system to track health care; the system, which will focus on insurance claims, doctor visits and prescriptions, is expected to improve employees' medical safety while reducing costs. The electronic records are expected to dramatically improve preventative care; employees will receive ongoing alerts for suggested and continuing treatment of health conditions. The system should also improve coordination among health care providers, especially when patients need to see multiple physicians. Other employers are expected to follow Dell's lead; the government 'has estimated that health IT can add $140 billion a year to the productivity of the $2 trillion health care industry.'"

Comments

Cost Cuts Be Passed Along?

[dakirw]

I'd be astonished if the employees ultimately benefit from these automated systems. The only thing that they'd get would be online access to their health records. The employers will say the employees benefit from getting health care in the first place. However, I'm a bit skeptical in this age of cost cutting that these tools won't be used to lump "problem" employees that use lots of coverage and force them into programs that would help the company save a bit of money. Is that legal? And how would the company get the information about the employee interactions with health providers - the insurance company, I'm guessing? It'd be an nightmare to get every doctor and pharmacy to plug into the system.

Represents one of the shifts

[tr0tt3r]

Everyone is generally dissatisfied with healthcare in the US, and there lots of people who believe that the accountability that computerized records can enforce could really change things. Now the customers of healthcare (employers) have balloning costs and very little to show that the healthcare they are purchasing is actually effective.

An obvious question is why proprietary medical software vendors have not addressed this issue already. Part of the reason is that there is no "Microsoft" in the industry. There is no proprietary player large enough to wrangle major IT changes for all of healthcare. This creates an opportunity for open source EMRs (The AMIA open source working group has an Review of Open Source EMRs btw) After all, how would Red Hat fare if there were no Microsoft. This is the opportunity for projects like MirrorMed to grow to be a dominate force.

Fred Trotter

Re:Represents one of the shifts

[tr0tt3r]

Show me System A that can talk to System B using HL7 and I will show you two systems that cannot talk to any other system in the world using HL7. HL7 is a weak standard. It might not be soon, there are lots of work to improve it...

In a way you have made my point. There is no one company large enough to make HL7 into a solid standard.

Also, while your comment regarding costs is true, it is also a massive oversimplification. What about drug costs, Fraudlent medical claims, uneeded CYA tests, and ineffecient paper based workflows. Pointing the finger at only one cost problem is unrealistic.

-FT

Re:I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree

[pilgrim23]

I would call your atitude "prudent". Here, if no where else, people shoul0d be a wee bit suspect of having their most personal and sensitive information available via the web.
    Avaialble to...whom exactly? -is the question

This whole thing is marketspeak about an upgrade.

[TheMohel]

From TFA:

Dell has offered limited electronic health records since 2004, but the upgrade coming Apr. 20 adds the ability for the system to automatically capture new information about treatments and test results, rather than waiting for the employee to enter the data manually.

So let me get this straight - this incredible new initiative is actually a lightly-used website, run by WebMD, that Dell employees have had for the past two years. And the newness is that the system can now "electronically" capture results. And Dell trumpets this in a major news release.

We will set aside the interesting question of how (and whether) WebMD has convinced thousands of independent labs, as well as laboratory giants like LabCorp, to send results to WebMD. We will ignore the HIPAA regulations that will require patients to sign releases with anyone sending results to WebMD. We will overlook the balkanized, backward, and poorly-penetrated electronic medical records world in which these patients' doctors work.

Even if all of these things were somehow not an issue, does anybody except Dell and WebMD marketing droids really believe that the only thing that was preventing this dramatic breakthrough from revolutionizing medical care for everybody was the lack of a stupid HL-7 interface?

Oh, wait. Never mind. Check the last part of the article:

The effort meshes with the federal government's plans to build a national health-information network that would keep electronic data on all Americans' care.

Yup. Sure. Got it. Tinfoil hats meet blue-sky dreamers, and the result is ugly.

Re:the fundamental problem with insurance

[Lord Ender]

Manipulation and homeopathic "medicine" often "work" because of the placebo effect.

If such treatments really worked (in double-blind, scientific tests) then they would just be called "medicine" without any qualifiers.

You're right: spending big money on treating people who are days from death may not be a good use of economic resources. But referring them to quacks is certainaly NOT the solution.