The following is a guest blog post by Andy Oram, writer and editor at O’Reilly Media.
The kind of health care reform that brings better care at a reasonable cost will consist of many, tightly interlocking strands. Each of us—everyday consumers and patients, health care providers, payers and public health officials, technology developers, policy makers, and clinical researchers—can do specific things to push health care forward, and many of these involve computer technology.
During a stint in the mental health field, I would meet regularly with a team of professionals from different disciplines (and with the patient) to work out a treatment plan. This article similarly lays out some tasks each of us in his or her respective fields can carry out. Like the meetings I attended many years ago, this is a collaborative approach where my suggestions are meant to elicit constructive responses and push-back.
Naturally, a treatment plan must start with a firm diagnosis and an assessment of the patient’s strengths and weaknesses. For health information technology, I try to provide that assessment in my report, The Information Technology Fix for Health: Barriers and Pathways to the Use of Information Technology for Better Health Care. Refer to it for background as we jump into action and assign tasks to each stakeholder.
Consumers/patients/citizens:
- Measure the vital signs that are important to your health, and extract them from the silos of devices or vendor web sites into your personal health record. The Blue Button Initiative promotes open standards that increasingly bring within your reach the records that others hold about you.
- This process is important because physicians will need your statistics to carry out effective diagnoses and planning—for instance, to know whether you need to make an office visit and even to check into the hospital. Collecting this data also means the clinical staff can review it before a visit and not waste your whole 15 minutes asking you about your condition.
- Casual readers may see this advice as simply an appeal to join the Quantified Self movement, but it is much, much more. Vital signs give you leverage that can drive change throughout the health care system. First, it creates a pressing need for the doctors’ electronic medical records to open up and accept patient-generated data. It can also lead to discussions about who owns your data—it should be you—and who gets to use it for research or other purposes. The ripple effects can render the entire health care industry more responsive and intelligent in handling patients—and also more respectful of their right to control the flow of their data.
Health care providers:
- Get involved in the design of the technologies you used. Demand to be on the design team, not just consultants on the sidelines, and demand that the software be easy to customize in deep ways that respond to your ways of doing things.
- This endeavor goes beyond ease of use and even beyond the prevention …read more
