Hello, I’m Vince from e-CareManagement and I’ll be one of your bloggers today. I’m honored to be invited to comment at the World Health Care Blog.

Today’s special is “technology”. It comes prepared two different ways on today’s menu.

1. Technology that increases quality, but also increases costs (how most people equate techology in health care today)
2. Technology that increases quality AND lowers costs

In a recent article in Health Affairs, Harvard Business School Prof. Clay Christensen describes the two varieties of technology:

There are two ways that technology can get deployed in health care. One is to help the experts in the health care system do even more sophisticated things that historically were not possible to do, so ultrasound or MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] screens allow people to see things in greater detail and at an earlier stage that historically just weren’t possible. When you bring technology to the experts to do more sophisticated things, in fact, it does bring a lot of cost into the system. But when you deploy the technology to commoditize the caregiver, to enable a lower-cost provider to do something that historically had required higher cost, then it actually takes cost out of the system.

Writing in California Medicine Man, John Ford provides an example of #2: CRNAs (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthesiologists) who can extend (or replace) anesthesiologists. In the process CRNAs wind up making more money than many primary care physicians.

Personally, I recommend #2, even though the “commoditizing the caregiver” part has a bittersweet taste to it.