The following is a guest blog post by Carl Bergman.
O’Reilly Media specializes in books, courses and online services in technical innovation. This week, it released a new, comprehensive study on IT in Healthcare: The Information Technology Fix for Health (PDF). It’s written by O’Reilly editor Andrew Oram, who frequently writes on healthcare IT’s trends and issues. Oram takes on four basic, health IT areas in this cogent review:
- Devices, sensors, and patient monitoring
- Using data: records, public data sets, and research
- Coordinated care: teams and telehealth
- Patient empowerment
In doing so, he brings a sound knowledge of health IT current technology and issues. He also brings a rare awareness that health IT often forgets its promise to combine modern tools with an intimate doctor patient relationship:
In earlier ages of medicine, we enjoyed a personal relationship with a doctor who knew everything about us and our families—but who couldn’t actually do much for us for lack of effective treatments. Beginning with the breakthroughs in manufacturing antibiotics and the mass vaccination programs of the mid-twentieth century, medicine has become increasingly effective but increasingly impersonal. Now we have medicines and machinery that would awe earlier generations, but we rarely develop the relationships that can help us overcome chronic conditions.
Health IT can restore the balance, allowing us to make better use of treatments while creating beneficial relationships. Ideally, health IT would bring the collective intelligence of the entire medical industry into the patient/clinician relationship and inform their decisions—but would do so in such a natural way that both patient and clinician would feel like it wasn’t there. P. 4-5.
Recommended reading.
About Carl Bergman
When Carl Bergman’s not rooting for the Washington Nationals or searching for a Steeler bar, he’s Managing Partner of EHRSelector.com, a free service for matching users and EHRs. For the last dozen years, he’s concentrated on EHR consulting and writing. He spent the 80s and 90s as an itinerant project manger doing his small part for the dot com bubble. Prior to that, Bergman served a ten year stretch in the District of Columbia government as a policy and fiscal analyst.
