High Tech and High Touch

Kaiser Permanente recently published an interesting study. They did a two year trial of patients with prior coronary artery disease. Approximately half the patients got their intense follow up program (including regular direct calls to the patient from a specialty pharmacist). The other half got electronically generated reminder letters to schedule the blood checks on their cholesterol.

The fascinating result was that both of these groups showed dramatically better results that patients without any reminder system. The difference between the "high touch" version and the simply "high tech" version was not very high. But the difference between nothing and either reminder system was very high, meaning the cheaper solution was highly effective.

Most institutions are not yet at the point where their EMR could be generating the reminder letters that Kaiser did. But it appears that processes like this may be where the meat of the cost savings promised by Healthcare IT will come from.