Why Do We Settle in Healthcare?

The following is a guest blog post by Monica Stout, Marketing Director at MedicaSoft. This is the introductory blog in a three-part sponsored blog post series focused on new Health IT for integration. Each month, a different MedicaSoft expert will share insights on new and innovative technology and its applications in healthcare.

Imagine your typical Friday night. You’ve worked hard all week and now you’re ready to watch Netflix. You’ve picked the perfect movie. You’re ready to watch. You hit a button and your movie is right there, available and on demand. But what if it didn’t work? You’d be annoyed. You’d hop on social media to complain or see if Netflix is down. Someone somewhere would hear you.

On Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you might visit Walmart.com to search for some holiday deals. These are the busiest shopping days of the year. What if the website didn’t work? Or, what if you had to enter your shipping and billing data every single time you viewed an item? You’d be outraged. You might hop on social media to complain or see if others are experiencing the same problem. Someone somewhere would hear you.

Now imagine it’s the middle of winter and you’ve caught the latest bug du jour. You call your doctor for an appointment. When you arrive, you’re handed a clipboard and asked to fill out the same repetitive paper form with your health information that you fill out every time you visit. You’re certain they have this information already, but you’re required to fill it out yet again. You might wait 30, 40, or 60 minutes past your appointment time before you’re called back to a room.

Once you’ve made it to an exam room, a nurse comes in to take your vitals. The nurse will ask questions about what medications you are on. Nine times out of ten, the medications the nurse repeats back to you are outdated or entirely incorrect. You wonder where that data came from and are sure you’ve told this particular office the same thing the last four times you’ve gone there, so why is it wrong? Again, you wait in the exam room for the doctor. Your doctor comes in and spends more time looking at a laptop screen and clicking than making eye contact with you. Do you hop on social media and complain? Probably not. Does anybody hear you? No, because you’ve accepted that this is just how it is. In fact, you were grateful to receive a same-day appointment instead of waiting at home in misery.

The technology exists today to make things work and work fast. Other industries have intuitive UIs that people use every single day – we use them so much we don’t think about them. So, why do we settle for what doesn’t work in healthcare? Why do we accept a system that isn’t operating in ways that are beneficial or efficient to us as patients or to our doctors or nurses? Shouldn’t health information technology and the systems that support our health, well-being, and in certain situations, life or death, work more efficiently than our television subscription services or retail websites? Technology can do better in healthcare.

The technology on the back-end of Wal-Mart’s servers was robust enough to handle Black Friday and deploy with over 200 million users online THREE YEARS AGO. Amazing, right? But it’s that way because people won’t accept something that doesn’t work. If Wal-Mart’s website wasn’t available come Cyber Monday, consumers would vote with their dollars and move on to another retailer’s website that did work. That retailer would get all the business. Yet in healthcare, we keep revisiting a system that’s broken – where our health records are disjointed, incomplete, exist in duplicate (or many, many more), and just don’t work well together across practices, hospitals, or health systems. We don’t have a one centralized record with our health information serving as our source of truth. Sharing data across our providers is broken.

I realize that healthcare is more complicated than simply voting with our dollars and moving on, but why is that? The Wharton School Economics Professor Eric K. Clemons wrote a great piece on why healthcare is complicated. The technology is there to help advance healthcare to be what humans need it to be, so when will we stop accepting less? When will we demand more?

There is technology that’s easy to use and access, makes your information available, and centralizes your health information into one record. In our subsequent guest blogs, our experts will talk in more detail about these best of breed technologies and how they can be applied to healthcare to capture, exchange, and share data.

About Monica Stout
Monica is a HIT teleworker in Grand Rapids, Michigan by way of Washington, D.C., who has consulted at several government agencies, including the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). She’s currently the Marketing Director at MedicaSoft. Monica can be found on Twitter @MI_turnaround or LinkedIn.

About MedicaSoft
MedicaSoft  designs, develops, delivers, and maintains EHR, PHR, and UHR software solutions and HISP services for healthcare providers and patients around the world. For more information, visit www.medicasoft.us or connect with us on Twitter @MedicaSoftLLC, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

   

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