I’m not sure what the relevant analogy might be, but I’ll take a shot, nonetheless.
Let’s say we poured billions of dollars into improving highways and city streets, but the local commute for residents continued to get longer, more frustrating, less effective.
Or, maybe we also dumped billions into school systems, but student test scores only got worse.
I ask if these comparisons are relevant after reading about a recent study published in the Lancet, which suggests that poor
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Do Americans Have Too Many Healthcare Choices? Can Healthcare IT Help?
A creatively illustrative scene from the 2008 film The Hurt Locker follows the primary character, William James, on a trip to a local grocery store.
James is an ordnance disposal technician home from the war in Iraq whose wife asked him to pick up a few things from the store, including cold cereal. As James stands dazed and overwhelmed before the wall of cereal options, the camera pans back to reveal an entire aisle wall—floor to ceiling, end to end— of cereal boxes from
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Why Hospitals Without Robust Revenue Cycle Support are Losing Millions
A frequent knock on electronic health records (EHRs) has been that they’re just glorified billing systems that fail to provide enough clinical functionality to make a significant difference in the quality of care.So it’s somewhat incongruous that a recent Black Book report on revenue cycle management (RCM) system adoption would say that 26 percent of hospitals don’t have an effective RCM system in place even as virtually all hospitals are using an EHR.How can that be?The explanation for any
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Can A Peace Treaty Between Doctors & EHRs Tackle Physician Burnout?
It may be difficult to recall now, what with the ongoing Cerner deployment and recent challenges that had little to do with technology, but there was a time when the Department of Veterans Affairs was considered the gold standard for healthcare IT.VA was out front with the initial development in the 1970s of the VistA system, which would come to be widely recognized and frequently honored. Indeed, when VA was overhauled in the 1990s, VistA was the primary tool that enabled the success of new
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Want to Improve Public Health Outcomes? Start with Housing
A well-worn axiom says that “hope is not a plan.” Indeed, hope alone is such a hands-up abdication of planning that editor Thomas Mowle was inspired to use the phrase as the title of his 2007 book of essays on the war in Iraq, which says something.Still, if we play with syntax and add a few words, we can say that every successful plan should offer a measure of hope—hope for success, an improved reality, greater opportunity.With the twin American scourges of homelessness and addiction, hope
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Opioid Legislation: Initial Salvo or Mission Accomplished?
Of course, the goal promoted before, during and since President Trump’s legislation signing ceremony in the White House last Wednesday is to reduce opioid addiction and attendant deaths.“Together, we are going to end the scourge of drug addiction in America,” said the president, before hedging his bet by adding, "We are going to end it or we are going to at least make an extremely big dent in this terrible, terrible problem."One can hope he’s right about the impact of the SUPPORT for Patients
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Is Behavioral Economics in Healthcare The Key to Future Patient Compliance?
In 2009, mostly to fund the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the U.S. government increased the tax on cigarettes from 39 cents to a $1.01. What followed was a demonstration of what we now commonly call behavioral economics.When taxes drove the price of cigarettes up, teenage smoking rates fell 10 percent, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and overall smoking dropped more than 8 percent, the most significant dip in smoking since 1932. The increase-taxes approach to
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EHRs Need More Bananas, Fewer Oranges to Improve Care
Physicians are people, too, as it turns out.Well of course they are, you say, perhaps while acknowledging that we may have expected doctors to perform superhuman feats since television feeds us a steady diet of doctors as boy geniuses, adult geniuses, other types of geniuses and personally troubled but ethically unassailable walking Greek tragedies.In the real world, we know that doctors these days are engaged in very human struggles to pay off massive medical school bills, walk the gauntlet of
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4 Ways Healthcare IT Can Save Rural Hospitals
In business, disruption is often seen as a good thing, e.g., digital photography disrupting Eastman Kodak’s business so significantly that the company has scrambled in recent years just to stay afloat, the thing they once did better than anyone now largely irrelevant.So, disruption is negative for employees of old technology companies, but it’s a boon for workers in cutting-edge businesses and generally for consumers as well. Those who benefit greatly outnumber those who don’t.And disruption
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4 Learning Curves That Healthcare IT Alone Cannot Address
In 2018, the phrase 'learning curve' is used so frequently that it’s essentially part of the English lexicon with little need for definitions and etymologies.In the late nineteenth century, however, both phrase and concept were yet to be invented. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus described what we know as the learning curve in the late 1800s and the term itself was first used in a 1903 issue of the American Journal of Psychology.Both the learning curve and institutional maturity have been
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