Health care requires improving technology, speaker says

Improving health care in the United States depends on advancing information technology, said a speaker on Monday at the Harvard Club of Boston’s Third Annual Public Health and Technology Conference.
David Bates, a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School as well as in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard, spoke to about 130 students and Boston area residents at the conference.
A graduate of Stanford University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Bates is known as one of the key proponents of improving the quality of national health care.
“He has also done more work to push forward health IT than arguably anyone else in the world,” said Ashish Jha, an associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard.
Bates began by speaking about the state of national healthcare.
“Your chances of getting care here are basically a coin flip, and the quality is not always excellent,” Bates said. “Yet the costs of care in this country are higher than anywhere else in the world.”
Bates suggested the creation of a health information technology system, which would provide a computerized framework over which consumers, providers and insurers could share information.
Electronic health records would implement a standardized patient records that could easily be shared among providers, Bates said. This simple, complete record would cut down on provider error and increase efficiency.
Bates said President Barack Obama’s plan to “computerize the nation’s health records in five years,” could save billions of lives.
There are only a few providers in the country using this system, while many countries in Europe have adopted digital records and communication.
However, Bates said he predicted that with the “meaningful use” stipends offered by the government, there would be a 70 percent rate of adoption in hospitals within 10 years.
“The key thing is that we implement with fidelity in a high variety of places,” Bates said. “Our system isn’t really a system right now but a bunch of cottage industries, and everyone’s pretty much doing their own thing.”
Bates said he was optimistic that technology would be able to reshape the way that different medical providers operate with each other, saving money and providing better health care.
Many attendees said they agreed with Bates’ opinion on how to improve health care.
“The ideas which were discussed today will be very important to the future of health care in this country,” said Heather Bello, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Public Health and vice president of the Harvard Public Health and Technology Student Forum.
“The theme that I took away was that we can use the enormous amount of data we’re getting and turn it into something we can actually use,” said Faith Wu, also a graduate student in the Harvard School of Public Health and president of the Harvard Public Health and Technology Forum. “It’s about turning data into actual wisdom.”