Why I Disagree with the Snake Oil Analogy

Earlier this week, the American Medical Association CEO called digital healthcare products modern-day "snake oil"As a provider and a technologist, I think we need a deeper dive to understand the issues, avoiding the kind of hyperbole that’s so common in politics today.Paul B. Batalden, MD, Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), once said “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”.Let’s take a brief look at the history of national healthcare IT efforts from 2004-2016 to understand how we’ve achieved exactly the results we designed.In 2004, National Coordinator David Brailer wrote “The Decade of Health Information Technology: Delivering Consumer-centric and Information-rich Health Care” suggesting that we move from a paper-based industry to electronic transactions, we share data, we do population analytics,  and we engage patients/families.All 5 of the national coordinators - Brailer, Kolodner, Blumenthal, Mostashari and DeSalvo have followed these 4 basic ideas.As a country, we invested $35 billion to move existing transactions from paper to electronic form and 85% of our clinicians/hospitals achieved that.     We also required patient access to educational materials, which have appeared in the form of a multiude of stand alone apps.   We did not suggest a fundamental redesign of healthcare workflow, we suggested a digitization of existing paper processes.   We accomplished exactly what we set...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs