'More is Better' Only Applies to Technology
Guest commentary by Andrew Schuyler, chief medical officer at MEDecision.
In a recent article on the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site, Dr. Deepak Chopra speculates that a lot of what's wrong with health care today can be attributed to the false notion that more is better. As a society, Dr. Chopra suggests, we've come to believe that by undergoing more tests, receiving additional procedures, taking more drugs and seeing more doctors more often, we'll be healthier. He offers myriad statistics to highlight the inefficiencies in our health care system and underscore the need for vast improvements.
Dr. Chopra's statistics also make clear the need for the increased use of technology as part of our reform efforts. With proper evidence-based clinical support and intelligence tools, physicians would be better able to determine medical necessity, which would help to lower the number of unnecessary procedures and the growing costs associated with them. With electronic medical records providing a more complete picture of a patient's medical background, it's likely we could forego certain tests, medications and specialist visits. With a greater breadth and depth of patient information readily at hand, clinicians could more quickly and assuredly make more informed decisions. That alone would support operational efficiencies and result in considerable savings. We can also extend technology to better educate patients and enable them to make more valuable contributions to the decision-making process. With greater knowledge, they themselves can help decide whether or not a certain test or procedure is in their best interest, or if the rewards of a certain medication are worth the potential risks, and so on.
These types of technologies are readily available and, given the potential return on investment, are relatively inexpensive to implement. While the debates in Washington and around the nation continue to focus on health insurance reform, it is important for all of us to understand that there are other, far less controversial and polarizing ways to generate health care reform. Technology is quite possibly the most promising and certainly a strategy through which we can begin making inroads while we argue the details of a more comprehensive plan.