Making Health Care Better

This article in the New York Times earlier this month is long, but worth reading. If the ads are distracting, try Readability.

David Leonhardt writes about Dr. Brent James of Intermountain Heathcare and how he is using data to improve the practice of medicine. A number of things have to be done to make this useful. And meaningful.

1) You have to have good data which shows concrete improvement in outcomes based on specific changes in health practices.
2) You have to give the practitioners that data as part of their regular workflow, making the preferred action easy to accomplish.
3) You still have to allow doctors to do what they feel is best for a specific patient. Meaning #2 above is not required, but suggested.
4) You have to measure which clinicians are following the suggestions and what the outcomes are in a continuous feedback loop.

It's a lot of work and it's complicated, which is why most medicine is not done this way.

Unfortunately, we also still have a system that doesn't reward some of the quality improvements that can be achieved using data like this; that's a subject for another post. It is easy to see how health care costs keep rising when preventing exacerbations and adverse events can cost a health system money, however.

Forget all the hype about healthcare IT and read this article. The potential we have for improving patient care is tremendous.