IT and Health Care

Punk CPA writes "Technology Review has some thoughts about why the health care industry has been so slow to adopt IT, while quick to embrace high technology in care and diagnosis. Hypothesis: making medical records available for data analysis might expose redundancy, over-testing, and other methods of extracting profits from the fee-for-service model. My take is that it might also make it much easier to gather and evaluate quality of care information. That would be chum in the water for malpractice suits."

Comments

Well..

[FatherOfONe]

Ok, I am in the heath care industry and am in I.T.

My first thought was that this is yet another attempt by an Obama supporter to help try and gain support for his socialist program. I think I still may be right on that one.

However, the core reason is that the health care industry is slow to move is that the cost of validating systems is huge. If a mistake is made it can put a company out of business. I am not saying this is a bad thing but a lot of businesses do the math and say it is cheaper to do it in a manual way. Now it looks like we want to force these companies to spend the money weather they like it or not. This is good for me, but I realize a lot of companies will be going out of business because of the cost. Sometimes a Rolodex works better than spending 5 million on an Oracle solution.