Drugs

The subject of drugs came up a couple posts back. Good time to introduce a geeky, but fascinating feature of our business, especially our healthcare, environment. You see, health care in this country is bafflingly under-technologized. I don't mean the fancy machines occupying entire rooms that can peer inside your brain or dissect your kidney with laser beams. These are ubiquitous, and the reason is that they drive up the cost of treatment.

Not so for the less-sexy technologies, e.g. keeping clean databases of patient records and making sure that all sorts of applications can read this information. The reason is simple and, I think, clear: this kind of infrastructure only increases the quality and reliability of patient care -- it does almost nothing to pad the bill.

This has perverse consequences. According to the Institute of Medicine, a non-governmental organization in Washington, D.C., preventable medical errors -- from unplanned drug interactions, say -- kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people each year in America alone. This makes medical snafus the eighth leading cause of death, ahead of car accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS
Economist. "The no-computer virus", April 30, 2005.

Now: as a part-time database-designer, I can assure you the technology to solve this problem is simple. But revamping the healthcare IT infrastructure is costly, and practices (especially small ones) need subsidy to undertake it, because they do not recoup all the benefits of streamlined information flow. A great deal accrues to the insurance companies, and to the employers or individuals who buy the insurance.

There is a new governmental office working to address this issue and their assessment of the barriers to adoption is a brief but haunting catalog of deeply-ingrained problems that are killing people.

"It's like crashing two 747s a day," says Mark Blatt, who was a family doctor for 20 years before he joined Intel ... There should, he says, be more outrage

What do you think? If two airplanes a day crashed for preventable reasons, how many weeks would it take for someone to fix this?