eHealth: Saving 49,000 Lives a Year

The research analysts at Gartner just released a list of technology predictions for the coming years.  One jumped out at us: 

"Healthcare has historically underinvested in IT, however, this is changing. Gartner analysts predict that by 2009, healthcare investments in IT will increase by more than 50 percent, which could enable clinicians to reduce the level of preventable deaths by 50 percent by 2013."

According to an Institute of Medicine study, anywhere between 44,000 and 98,000 die each year in U.S. hospitals due to medical errors making them the fifth to eighth leading cause of death in the country.  Additionally, medical errors, cost the U.S. health care system approximately $38 to 50 billion a year.   

Sometimes it's necessary to put a human face to these overwhelming statistics, consider this tragic story...      

A 21-year-old San Jose man died Aug. 29 at Kaiser Permanente's Santa Teresa Medical Center, three days after a physician injected him with the wrong medication.

Christopher Wibeto, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was given the wrong chemotherapy drug on Aug. 26, a report by the California Department of Health Services determined.

Sadly and, unfortunately, ironically even the man running the Kaiser Permanente's network of hospitals has a personal experience with similar fate as the young San Jose man.  From an op-ed that ran this week in the San Jose Mercury News penned by Permanente Medical Group CEO Robert Pearl:

"My father died two years in Florida from a medical error. He died in spite of having excellent doctors and dedicated nurses. He died because medical care has become incredibly complex and because as a nation we have not devoted enough attention to implementing electronic medical record systems and other methods to ensure patient safety."

Pearl continues:

"In my father's case, it was an error of omission -- the inability of his doctors to share a common electronic medical record. His doctors in Florida and New York, where he spent half the year respectively, all assumed he had received a necessary vaccine, one that all of them knew he needed, but ultimately one that he simply was never given."

Fortunately, companies like Cisco, IBM, Sun Microsystems, EMC, Intel and others have jumped into eHealth head first and are working to develop solutions that could prove Gartner prescient.

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BTW, there is a good amount of controversy over the estimate of preventable deaths.  Not surprisingly physician groups claim the numbers are overblown, while others say that even the top-end of the IOM estimate misses the mark by more than 100,000 deaths a year.

For a well-researched opinion on the facts of medical errors and how technology can minimize them, we send you on our first Google Books result:

Federal Initiatives in Information Technology to Improve Patient Safety and Quality of Care

By:  Dr. Eduardo Ortiz

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I was searching on the mgiranal returns phrase related to another topic, but since I wound up here, and I was just thinking abt the healthcare system, I will give you a reply.Having lived both in NZ and USA and experienced the healthcare systems in each, I can confirm for you your suspicions about the level of complexity in the USA. What is the majority of this about? Much is about this question: Who is going to pay? Take a routine procedure such as a cholesterol check. First there's the blood draw. If this occurs at a separate facility, you get your first round of paperwork and, Who is paying? Then you'd like a PCP, or even a cardiologist, to sit and go over the results. Again more paperwork and, Who pays? A huge amount of manpower gets diverted processing all the permutations for this, for what should amount to inexpensive procedures that we should be _encouraging_ people to participate in. In comparison in NZ you can go to any one of a number of facilities for the blood draw, you are in-out with no paperwork or fees save for where to send the results. The doctor consultation is accessible and inexpensive, $36NZD, which amounts to maybe $30 US for the entire thing. Pay at exit.I can only imagine the back office team at work in a US doctor's office processing the documentation for this sort procedure, all to sort out the deductibles, verify coverage, copays, and all the minutia of every individual's program and circumstances.To me this sort of treatment in the US is ALREADY broken, because while you can get something done, many people won't due to the obstacles thrown up by for-profit medicine. Your PCP won't know you if you are lucky enough to have one, as employers jump from plan to plan and the one who sees you likely won't communicate well with any specialists and others involved in diagnosis and treatment, should it come to that. Too much time pressure, always another patient to see and a pile of forms to process. There are exceptions (and exceptional individuals) in the US, and that largely comes down to unique physicians and how they decide to run their practice. It's just easier to provide good care when the system itself is designed to support it.

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