Monday, November 22, 2004
A high-tech vision for the future of health care
[Steve Lohr, "Building a Medical Data Network," The New York Times, 22 November 2004.]
There has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding the cost savings and improved health outcomes resulting from a shift away from paper records and toward digital. But, as this article explains, there may be much more on the horizon and the future of the third-party payer system may be at stake:
[D]igital patient records are merely a first step toward a broader vision. Those records could become building blocks in a nationwide biomedical computer network for assembling and distributing up-to-the-minute epidemiological studies. The network could show researchers and physicians what treatments work for people with similar characteristics, ailments and, eventually, gene markers. To protect privacy, personal identifiers would be stripped out of the national network.
There are plenty of technical obstacles and privacy concerns that would have to be overcome. Yet such a network is part of the 10-year plan being promoted by the National Institutes of Health, among others. "The dream is that every physician will be able to tap into that national biomedical network from his or her desktop computer," said Dr. Eric Jakobsson, who heads the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative at the National Institutes of Health.
The presumed benefits would be improved quality and higher standards of health care. But such a network would also provide the basis for far more efficient markets in health care - and would have the potential to shake up both the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.
[Steve Lohr, "Building a Medical Data Network," The New York Times, 22 November 2004.]
There has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding the cost savings and improved health outcomes resulting from a shift away from paper records and toward digital. But, as this article explains, there may be much more on the horizon and the future of the third-party payer system may be at stake:
[D]igital patient records are merely a first step toward a broader vision. Those records could become building blocks in a nationwide biomedical computer network for assembling and distributing up-to-the-minute epidemiological studies. The network could show researchers and physicians what treatments work for people with similar characteristics, ailments and, eventually, gene markers. To protect privacy, personal identifiers would be stripped out of the national network.
There are plenty of technical obstacles and privacy concerns that would have to be overcome. Yet such a network is part of the 10-year plan being promoted by the National Institutes of Health, among others. "The dream is that every physician will be able to tap into that national biomedical network from his or her desktop computer," said Dr. Eric Jakobsson, who heads the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative at the National Institutes of Health.
The presumed benefits would be improved quality and higher standards of health care. But such a network would also provide the basis for far more efficient markets in health care - and would have the potential to shake up both the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.
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