Healthcare IT
I’m the first to complain about the quality of healthcare software. It’s often terrible, amateur UI, win32 apps put together by small companies that are nowhere near the cutting edge. But, stories like this Tech Review article that state Healthcare doesn’t computerize more because they are trying to hide their huge profits are just annoyingly simplistic.
People outside of healthcare, I think, have the problem of thinking that since they infrequently interact with the system, the system is simple. Not everyone of course, but hopefully most people aren’t spending significant amounts of time in healthcare. That doesn’t mean healthcare goes away when you do though, it’s a huge industry. Every year over 2 trillion dollars are spent. 15% of US GDP.1.
The calls to “computerize” need to be seriously considered. What do people mean when they say that? To take the example from the article linked above,
As a result, analyzing the effectiveness of specific treatments–for example, spinal-fusion surgery versus physical therapy for back pain caused by a herniated disc–is unnecessarily expensive and time consuming.
We could do research like this if we had all the healthcare data computerized in standard formats that were searchable. And I mean all the data, clinical, lab, imaging, survivorship, outcomes, (standards for measuring those outcomes!). Let me just say, this type of searching in a subset of results is one of my day job responsibilities, and even within one large hospital I would love it if this were true. The doctors would love it even more because they could publish even more, and make all sorts of discoveries.
While this level of computerization and standards would be fantastic, no industry is currently at this level of data modeling and standardization. (more…)