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

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.