Waving the Health IT Flag
by Malorye Allison
Newt Gingrich, John Kerry, Billy Beane and John Halamka are all waving the health information technology flag, trying to get the attention of both candidates so that, whichever one wins, health IT finally may get the attention it deserves.
In an unlikely collaboration, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane joined with politicians Newt Gingrich and John Kerry for an editorial that maintains medicine is light years behind baseball in terms of its use of IT. The trio writes in the New York Times that: “Remarkably, a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures.”
While baseball managers have moved to a “statistics-based creed called sabermetrics” to improve their teams’ performances, doctors continue to rely on “Informed opinion, personal observation or tradition,” to guide their decisions, not statistics born of rigorous clinical studies, according to Beane et al.
Meanwhile, health IT champion John Halamka, who is CEO at Harvard Medical School, writes a letter to the next president in Technology Review, asking for:
(1) Incentives for adoption and use of EHRs, and crafted so that physicians share cost savings.
(2) Incentives for hospitals to adopt CPOE (computerized physician order entry) – “the most important tool hospitals can introduce to improve their safety, quality, and efficiency of care.”
(3) Continued federal funding for technology and policies encouraging interoperability.
Beane, Kerry and Gingrich point out that “a health care system that is driven by robust comparative clinical evidence will save lives and money.” Both candidates have shown an interest in using health IT to get there. Hopefully, that will be one of the promises whoever wins follows up on.
