It's a start. The current industry stakeholders will spend a lot of money
to block any change. Why change when you're raking in billions for
basically denying service to your customers. It's only the current
economic implosion that's forcing the issue.
The next step will be to look at functional replacements to primary
care physicians. Knowledge based computer systems are already
performing diagnostic work more faster, more reliably and for much
less money than what is in place today. Obviously the AMA will fight
such substitution with tooth and nail ("We have to protect the
children!") and it will take the continued cries of dying patients to allow
the healthcare industry to evolve at a rate comparable to that of the
computer industry.
What's wrong with a nurse practitioner collecting data (they do that
today anyway), measuring blood pressure, look for signs, take blood,
urine and even stool samples for sending to the testing lab. A
knowledge computer provides the initial diagnosis (choices with an
assigned probability and recommended further testing) for review by
the nurse practitioner and forwarding to a specialist where warranted.
Costs would go way way down... And you could spend the surplus in
currently spent dollars on basic research and advancing the concept
of full lifespan (120 years) quality of life.
By the way, now you have a lot of resources that should be helping
the following generations get up to speed...
Cisco and UnitedHealth unveiled a tele-medicine service called Connected Care in Washington, D.C., at the center of both the health and health IT reform debates.
The service is a branded version of Cisco’s HealthPresence, a telemedicine product which seeks to replicate an office visit using network technology.
The press conference, at the Botanical Garden across from the Capitol, was confronted by Single Payer Action, a political group advocating a single payer health system, but this had no impact on the glowing reports delivered on the conference by the business press.
One Cisco pilot was done in Aberdeen, Scotland, which is served by a single-payer system. The other pilot was done at Cisco’s headquarters.
The event was scheduled to have maximum impact on two ongoing political debates, one the “meaningful use” debate concerning health IT, which could bring Cisco millions in stimulus money, the other the larger debate on health care reform, which is directly threatening United Health’s business model.
UnitedHealth pushed the Cisco plan as the best way to get care to underserved communities. Cisco’s agenda is to sell gear for use by hospitals, clinics and at-home.
The big problem with reform, however, is not technology. It’s the current market, which features a limited number of primary care physicians, and a host of specialists who have invested heavily in clinics and imaging centers to whom they refer patients.
Running people through a remote office is not, in the end, very different from running them through your own office. What’s needed are more primary care physicians, and fewer specialists sporting conflicts of interest.
