I’m Dr. Kaveh Safavi, the Global Lead of Cisco’s Healthcare Practice and I want to welcome you to Cisco’s new healthcare blog. Be sure to watch John Chambers’ video (right) to hear what John has to say about the importance of healthcare transformation. Over the course of the coming months we will be framing the overarching issues facing our healthcare community -- and looking for the “Wisdom of Crowds” to help find the answers. Noted healthcare author, Carey Kriz, will be pulling together his ideas (and yours if you’re willing to share them) into a publication, which he will unveil through a series of weekly blogs and this website. And you have the chance to become part of the writing team.
Healthcare Transformation: Join the Conversation
In an effort to keep conversations fresh, Cisco Blogs closes comments after 90 days. Please visit the Cisco Blogs hub page for the latest content.
One thing we have to do is create an environment that allows physicians to make decisions based on what’s best for patient care. Today they have to make decisions based on what’s best for the practice to maintain revenue. Technology can only do so much and perhaps this is not a subject that belongs on this blog.
As a licensed health care provider who has been a trainer of peers, there are some advantages to the new automated process, in the realm of diagnosis and treatment. Most patients do want to be treated in a one-on-one basis given specific care, however we are unable to bear the burden to this cost. The small business that I have formed is an approved government contractor. It is by stepping out of the clinic into the realm of health care management and administration that I find my role most beneficial to the care providers that are becoming members of my most recent team. We are getting ready to integrate acupuncture care in the managment of pain, while using computers to transfer data and record payments to reimbuse the providers at an appropriate living wage. My own nutrition education protocol has been designed to use webcameras for remote health care to treat using traditional medicine methods approved by the World Health Organization. We expect to see some dramatic shifts in the responsibility back to the patients, more often to meet their own needs.
Medical Strategist I have to disagree. Healthcare is not global; healthcare is local. The globalization of healthcare is a disaster waiting to happen; actually it already has. The best example is remote radiology services. It has marginalized and commoditized a very critical component of care. Those companies that provide these services are reaping the rewards but patient care is suffering. I guess money is all that matters.
Medical Strategist, where do medical tourists go for care? I know many Canadiens who can afford it come to the U.S. but you’re talking about something very different. Where would someone in the U.S. who doesn’t have coverage go? Can you define our population”"? Is that world population or U.S.? Is medical tourism a reality for uninsured U.S. citizens today?”
Medcial Strategist & RedM3, good points in each case, however due to the unmet Millennium Development Goals, thanks to the cost of transportation, security and other matters that affect us all, it is my best assumption that using the internet will help us reach more lives and educate most young people. Often the Public has better computer skills than us providers. It may be time to take a few courses on health care communication via the web. We have a protocol that requires simple webcam capability for individuals who simply can not travel due to cost, health condition, or simple lack of means to do so. We must find and utilize all methods to reach and teach. This is the medicine of the times.
Since all I’ve read so far is self serving responses that have little to do with using technology to fix the U.S. care system here are some ideas to get things started maybe.I just read an article re Obama and health IT. Having worked in healthcare for the past 17 years, mostly in IT, I have many concerns about how the U.S. will intend to use IT to “save money†and improve care. To many IT people saving money with IT means consolidating things in the data center to save on storage costs or similar strategy. That’s in the idiots guide to saving money with IT.When IT is focused on saving money it often comes at the expense of those tasked with using the technology. Many IT projects don’t take into account the impact the project has on the end user. If you talk to nurses many will tell you of their displeasure with new applications they are expected to use. Too many times an IT project with good intentions doesn’t deliver on its promise because the solutions have the wrong focus. Healthcares primary role is to provide healthcare, not great IT systems. Keep in mind I am an IT person who adores technology. Many of the people I provide solutions for aren’t nearly as enamored with technology as I am. Healthcare solutions need to start at the point of care and work their way back to the data center. Far too often it is the reverse.The notion of “economies of scale†pitched by large integrated health networks is a fallacy. It is more like complexities of scale. I’ve seen many more large networks fail than succeed. I see even more that try to save money with IT and destroy the core business. This is true with any business but is much more harmful in healthcare since we’re dealing with people’s health.Healthcare is a unique industry and that fact needs to be acknowledged and understood by IT. I currently work with a hospital partner who continually tries to apply banking concepts to healthcare. It doesn’t work. Healthcare has little in common with banking. Security needs are great in both industries but that’s about where the similarities end. I’ve often been envious of banking since they’ve done such a great job of applying technology that really supports their core business of providing financial services. What other industry can save a fortune in labor costs by implementing technology (ATM’s) then turn around and charge their customers to use it? BRILLIANT!There’s no glue holding all these initiatives together. We have so many initiatives going in different directions that it’s going to be difficult to pull it all together one day. With the governments initiatives to promote regional health information organizations (RHIO’s) we are actually creating little pockets of disparate systems. Pennsylvania is doing one thing while California is doing another for example. That’s a lot of resources being committed to the development of non standard practices. Without a nationwide coordinated effort I fear too many developments underway today will be wasted along with the resources provided to get them off the ground. Most RHIO’s have done nothing substantial other than forming the group. Once they get down to actually implementing an exchange they find it’s nearly impossible to do. We’re spending, and in my opinion wasting, tremendous amounts of resources we can’t afford to waste. Nothing substantial has come from this funding to date.Rarely do I like to criticize without offering an alternative to a problem. I think IT can play a major role in fixing this nations healthcare with a great deal of help from our government. I am not a proponent of socialized medicine but the government has to lead the way. Here are some things I think the government can help with.o Get the infrastructure in place to support a nationwide healthcare network. This is kind of underway already. The FCC rural health telecommunications program is making dollars available to assist in the cost of building statewide fiber health networks. The FCC grant covers 85% of the construction cost to bring fiber to the DMARC at the hospital. For some even the 15% is too much to swallow. I know of at least 3 hospitals in Iowa that are more than 20 miles from the nearest fiber path. The construction cost for them exceeds $500,000.00 and the $75,000.00+ that would be there share is not feasible for them. At some point all these statewide networks will need to be interconnected to form the nationwide network that will be needed to share health data between providers both for-profit and non-profit alike. Every hospital and provider needs to be able to afford to connect. Communication carriers that are used to operating in a free open market are going to have a problem with this.o Getting paid for services provided needs to be less complicated. Healthcare providers spend more time and resources trying to get paid than providing care. Health insurance companies’ do all they can to hang on to their money as long as they can. Even if they are going to eventually pay it behooves them to hold on to their money and let it work for them as long as possible. If that means creating an infrastructure so complicated that virtually any claim can be rejected than so be it. There needs to be a standard method of submitting a claim and receiving payment and it all needs to be electronic and it needs to be prompt. HIPAA was supposed to solve this problem and that was going to offset the cost of implementing systems to support the security and privacy regulations contained in the legislation. We have not seen this standardization for billing and thus not realized the savings all while having to absorb the cost of the security and privacy requirements. What suffers when a provider has to spend money on implementing security and privacy but doesn’t get the savings from improved billing process? The core business of providing care is what suffers. Provider costs are going up, reimbursements are going down, and none of the savings promised are being realized.o Strict standards must be developed and health information system vendors must comply with those standards. The IHE has been working towards that for some time but participation is voluntary. If a HIS vendor wants to conduct business in the U.S. they must be forced to comply.o All U.S. citizens need to have available to them a national health identification number. This would probably have to be a voluntary program since many fear this form of positive identification. By opting out of this they would forgo the benefit of holding an ID. Health information systems need to be able to utilize this ID either as the primary MRN for the institution or as a secondary ID. This national ID would be used when updating or pulling information from a national health information exchange. There absolutely must be a way to positively identify a patient when they walk through your door.o The national health information exchange would contain a person’s entire clinical history as well as insurance information. Individuals should be able to carry this information with them as well. This would be useful if communications to the national exchange were down. Smart cards or secure memory keys could be used.o Applications used by clinicians need to support the way they work. Careful and thoughtful attention must be paid to who is using this technology. Too often IT builds systems that work for IT but not the clinician. They are so focused at saving money with storage networks they end up wasting money since the applications don’t get used in the manner they were designed to.Having the infrastructure in place, the ability for the provider to get paid with little resource commitment, information systems that seamlessly exchange information, support the clinical workflow and provide a positive way to identify a person to retrieve their clinical history are all necessary to transform our failing healthcare system. If we focus our efforts on “saving money†it will just be another failed healthcare IT initiative in my opinion. I have one last comment about HIPAA. We need to stop using HIPPA as an excuse why we can’t do something. Many times when an entity or group tries to influence sharing information to promote better patient care someone, usually the organizations’ HIPAA Nazi, steps up and says “that’s a HIPAA violationâ€ÂÂÂÂ. HIPAA was never intended to prevent good patient care. If a patient was seen recently at hospital X then when that same person shows up at hospital Y they have to have access to hospital X’s data on that patient. This is just ridiculous. This is where the government has really screwed up. You have one hand clamping down on access and the other hand trying to promote sharing of information. We always seem to take one step forward and two steps back. We have to stop doing that.
The primary care physician needs to be the keeper of the patient’s healthcare record in my opinion. Transforming our broken system to allow for that will be a tremendous challenge. PCP’s that are employed by systems need to see at least 30 patients a day minimum. How a physician would fit in time to manage their patient’s records is beyond me. Most PCP’s are dissatisfied with the assembly line process we have forced them in to. They do not feel they are participating in the noble profession they thought they were choosing for themselves. PCP’s that have fought the urge to become employed and stay independent operate on a shoe string and even with funds available in the current stimulus can’t afford the high cost of implementing and maintaining an EMR. Drastic change is needed and I don’t see anything the government is doing to correct the core problems our system has. I look forward to reading how others think these problems will be solved.
This is a terrific forum to discuss healthcare issues and the relevant evolution of companies like Medcentrek who are blazing trails in medical and dental global health also known as medical tourism.
Maintaining a continuum of quality care while controlling costs is the heart of the issue. The EHR will reduce some of the paper burden but the overall impact on cost of healthcare remains to be seen. There is an emerging global market for healthcare and those organizations that understand and embrace it will realize savings and be most effective at maintaining the continuum of care with well coordinated patient handoffs.
RedM3, point taken. However, with over 1/3 of our population under or uninsured and other countries providing equally qualified services, quality of life will be dramatically reduced for those that cannot afford our healthcare system. Global healthcare afords the masses of the world to seek affordable medical and dental care. Having served in the Army for over 26 years in healthcare administration, I know first hand that global healthcare is not new and it is already positively impacting lives. Preventive care on the other hand is community based and is a critical part of reducing the cost of healthcare and positively impacting lives.
I whole heartedly agree that individuals need to be educated on how to keep themselves healthy and take responsibility for their own health. I don’t think that’s the role Cisco needs to play. Perhaps you’ve heard of WebMD. That and many other educational resources are available now and it doesn’t need to be reinvented. I think the bigger problem as it relates to keeping ourselves healthy is being responsible for our own health. Working in healthcare for nearly 20 years it is apparent a great number of people believe they can abuse themselves as much as they want and the expectation is the doctor can cure whatever health issues result from bad habits such as smoking, poor nutrition, and a sedimentary life style. Education needs to play a role but this blog I think should concentrate on what technology can do to help solve our nations ailing healthcare system. To be successful you need focus. Cisco and companies like that should focus on what they do best in my opinion.
It is a pleasure to participate in such a thoughtful blog. I want to provide some response to the beginning article. To start I will provide some personal viewpoints that I have. I look at healthcare reform in two pieces. One is to transform the financial aspects of the system which would encompass insurance and provider payments. The other is restructuring the organization of the provision of care. While most discussion relevant to primary care is focused on the concept of patient centered care, I believe it will be more useful to consider the framework of population oriented care. This variation likely will suggest some different roles for the primary care doctor and information technology.I have gathered some numbers from various articles that paint a picture of some elements relevant to the discussion.1. 75 percent of primary care practices have 5 or fewer physicians.2. 90 percent of all patients get care from solo practitioners.3. More physicians are opting for employment as opposed to fee-for-service.4. A study of Medicare physicians over one year (in 2000) identified that primary care doctors interacted with several hundred other physicians in 117 different practices.5. A recent CDC study found that emergency room visits were estimated to be 90.3 million in 2006, an increase of 32 percent from 1996.6. The rate of emergency room use for Medicaid patients was 82 per 100 as compared to 21 per 100 for those covered by private insurance.There is no question in my mind but that primary care doctors will be critical to restructuring. However, the efficiency and quality of care will be enhanced if primary care physicians have developed relationships with the physicians they will most be referring to. In the future primary care physicians must be associated with a multi-specialty organization. Transfer of relevant information will be facilitated. Too often today info is not passed to the primary care provider. Certainly access to information can be critical to the care provided in an emergency room. This does not require the national, complete history EHR that is referenced too often. Access to information at the primary care physician will provide adequate base data in most cases, if it is appropriately there. Referral from the ER as follow-up will also be made easier with primary care physicians who are treating the patient or are available to become the lead in treating the patient. In South Los Angeles where the King/Drew ER was closed efforts are being made to connect with Community Health Clinic to become the primary care provider so that the ER system is not overburdened with ongoing use by treated patients.
How sad that we have to force PCP’s to unwillingly join multi-specialty practices. I have a certain belief that it doesn’t have to be that way but I don’t want to go down a political path with this blog. The ER being used as primary care is a problem that can be solved in any number of ways. Yours is one way but there are others. I think your solution is typical of American healthcare today. Treat the symptoms not the cause.
My use of must”" was not good, I should have said “”encouraged”". I do believe that the delivery organizations that will work best in the future will be structured as a team rather than individual providers. This will include the vast variety of care givers who can contribute to effective, efficient care. I visualize the PCP as the quarterback of the team. They would oversee care management and disease management and work with nutitionists and others focused on prevention. Certainly information will be critical to that role.I agree that the funds provided to RHIOs will turn out to be a misguided use of scarce resources. Since RHIOs do not deliver and are not responsible for healthcare delivery they have to focus on specifying their role. That in itself has proven to be costly.However IDNs are critical organizations that can benefit from integrated data. They should be the focus of the effort to implement EHRs. Developing those EHRs will be challenged by the fact that less than 5% of hospitals have full-blown EHRs implemented according to a recent report.Conceptually the challenge to the National Health Care System will be to provide optimal care to the population within a fixed budget. Of course Kaiser is the premier example of a single organization that has somewhat successfully operated within that framework. No single payment/financial structure should be necessary. Information is critical to making judgments on providers to be used and treatments best used. That is where I believe the focus on populations is required to make optimal decisions.”
I’m glad we can find some common ground here. I agree completely the PCP needs to be the quarterback”" of the team. One problem that needs to be addressed is returning the profession of family physician to a desired career. We can’t just keep beating intelligent people with a stick and expect them to take it. Our best and brightest will all become lawyers and what a mess that will be. I appreciate your thoughtful comments.”
As the flurry of emails dies down, has a resolution been made? Has health care reform slid to the background? When will the President’s stimulus plans reach the health care providers’ budgets, where the services can not be stopped as the flow of patients into emergency rooms and urgent care facilities continues in waves? Currently our company is waiting for a contract proposal that was to be awarded nearly two months ago. Our team has diligently maintained their existing practices, while preparing to move the model of care into one more in keeping with the newer, secure IT data exchange, and direct provider payment, and one-to-one patient attention using acupuncture; a model for pain management that the VA requested and is using on the front lines in war zones, even today. When will someone step into the void and move the mountain that has been established in the health care field to one side so that the patient and provider may communicate, payments processed, and statistical models reflect the improvement?Does anyone have a sense of how the Reform process is being implemented?
Connectivity is important and so is technology in helping us all live a better quality of life. But before any of that can be effective beyond a few, we must find ways to use our vast ability to move information to educate the common citizen about their own body, how it works and what they can do to keep it working to the best of its ability. Most of us know you have to change your car’s oil, etc., or it will lead to an early demise for your vehicle. Our bodies are even more complex. I have watched the eyes of patients as a physician attempts to explain an illness, an exam, a proceudre and so many times their eyes lireally get a far away look. They don’t understand the words or their body, let alone what they have just consented to have done. Education of the populace must at minimum go hand in hand with improved health connectivity. I would suggest that Cisco look into producing online courses about the body to achieve at minimum a functional knowledge of the human anatomy shand function. These courses could be free, but have quizzes and finals leading to a Cisco certificate. Just as auto mechanics are ASE certified on a number of automobile functions before they can work independently on that sub system, and so should we have a basic understanding before we can make intelligent decisions about lifestyle and health related matters.
AcuNutriDoc, that’s a great question. I certainly wish I had the answer. I’m looking for our professional organizations to provide some guidance. In radiology we have a couple of organizations, RSNA and SIIM, that I hope will be able to shed some light on things for us. I’m not sure the government understands there are vast differences between various specialties and we all need to use information differently. For us I’m uncertain what meaningful use”" of an EHR is. We don’t necessarily use or own an EHR. We are a contributor to other physician’s EHR. The content we produce, the radiology report, is what we contribute. Does that mean there’s no stimulus for us? We still have huge cost and resource commitment to be able to efficiently get our contribution in to other physician and hospital EHR’s. I suspect other specialties have unique circumstances like that. I would look toward those organizations that help advance your specific specialty for direction. Good luck.”
Yes, it does make a difference what service and/or product we are delivering to the patient population, RedM3. That is why our specifics of acupunture treatments is being marketed directly to meet a request by the VA. We see the military as one of the largest populations requiring care, and as we bring more troops home to go to school or work and begin a new life, the use of acupuncture will reduce the potential addictions associated with pain medication. The VA showed a need for more and better care when the events at Walter Reed came to light. It is our hope that the new budget President Obama is supporting for military spending provides sufficient health care money needed.
I think this is a great strategy by Cisco which I think will gain a lot of traction by the health care community.
I was encouraged to read the other comments. I am happy that many approve of Cisco’s efforts.
Indiana et al, We know you all have WellPoint in your backyard; one of the largest corporation associated with health care services so it is good to begin to establish connections through Cisco’s hosting site. We can find common ground here and unmet needs that another may have resources to meet. Acupuncture is one of the medical treatments currently approved and included in the ICD10 coding by the World Health Organization. In order to provide the best, seamless care for our patients, it is important to include multiple modalities that may be complementary. This is the adventure of health care in this new Millennium, dictated by the MDGs.
Indianapolis has a model for health information exchange that others should follow. I’m curious if the heart hospital participates in that exchange and could share some details of how they use it.
I’m disappointed at the lack of focus on this blog. Cisco is a technology company and is looking for input on how TECHNOLOGY can help transform our ailing healthcare system. With the exception of webweb all I read are self promoting blobs of useless information about how a particular business model or modality can help cure disease. While important that is not the topic of discussion on this blog. I’m also disappointed that those who have the technical expertise are not sharing their thoughts and ideas. So far this seems to be a pretty big waste of time. I have little hope that our healthcare system will be transformed in to anything that will correct the problems given the reluctance of those to participate in a meaningful way. It seems like it’s all just a grab for cash at this point. No real change at all…
Dear RedM3,Thanks for your comment. Even though Cisco is a technology company — the focus of this blog is on solutions to the long-standing issues in patient care. Such solutions may or may not include information technology (although from a Cisco perspective, we believe that IT will be critical). The idea here is to step back and re-think what we’re doing in healthcare and to explore whether there’s a better way to be doing it. Overall, we’re trying not to let this become a hammer in search of a nail”" type of a self-serving discussion for Cisco. Rather we want to focus the discussion on the big topics and work our way through to new ways of thinking and ultimately to new solutions. We appreciate your contributions to this blog, and we’ll be coming forward with some new topics/structure soon for exploration.”
Unfortunately, there apparently are not bloggers here who understand the purpose. I also am disappointed. Another point I would like to make. A critical element in the expanded use of I.T. is the potential for enhanced data integrity. Many of the elements in the proposed Health Reform legislation are dependent on valid data. Care standards, bundled payment, pay for performance and so forth. In major hospitals 10 percent or more patients have more than 1 record. This can be controlled with improved I.T. and certainly integrated data across provider organizations require a strong I.T. base.I had worked on the early development of DRG’s – we threw darts at dirty data to develop the payment schemes. Besides kaiser and a few other integrated systems there is not adequate/accurate data for epidemiological studies. Policy discussions talk as if any analysis coming from a computer is good. They should only know.
It has been my experience that despite the cumbersome nature, the Veteran Affairs has one of the most effect and used forms of information exchange for patient records and medical research that is tied to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Rather than create a new wheel, it is our company’s goal to interweave our data into the existing database. This may be a particularly good time to do so since there is an overhaul in process to convert to the globally recognized ICD-10 diagnostic/treatment data exchange. This particular coding update includes traditional medicines, as their value in the treatment of chronic disease has proven itself over time, regardless of gender, age, climatic conditions, food insecurity, and some many other factors that challenge human health.
We work in AIDC technologies, barcode and RFID specifically. These are critical to the transformation of healthcare.From our industial clients we have been told that the wireless technologies 802.11 and bluetooth have enough contention issues that they consider them as not good enough for ‘mission critical’ processes in manufacturing. At the present time many hospitals and IT suppliers and support personnel are deploying both 802.11 and bluetooth in their environment. It seems that a hospital has mission critical communication needs at least as much as manufacturing. What has to be done to allow these two to be used with confidence? Diagnostic tools? Tips on what to avoid?
Bluetooth is a specification for a small form-factor, low-cost, short-range radio solution for providing links between mobile computers, mobile phones, and other portable and hand-held devices. Bluetooth operates in the same frequency band as the 802.11b and 802.11g protocol does, that being 2.4Ghz. And any time there are two devices operating on the same frequency, in the same vicinity, there is the possibility of interference. There are two classes of Bluetooth. The major difference between the two classes is communication range and power requirements. As a rule, you will typically trade power consumption for distance (though all Bluetooth devices typically have low power requirements relative to other types of computer add-in devices). Class 2 Bluetooth devices have a communication range of 10 meters (30 feet), and Class 1 adapters provide a communication range of 100 meters (300 feet).In most cases a Bluetooth device in healthcare is a class 2 device. This may not be the case for manufacturing, where the devices are used for longer distance communication links and need more power. A class 2 bluetooth devices is usually operating at a much lower power level (0.25 to 2.5 milliwatts) than 802.11 devices. I say most because, in some cases, the 802.11 network may be set up as low as 1 milliwatt, based on density of users (but not usually the case to be set this low). Additionally, Bluetooth limits power output to exactly what the device requires at any given time. For instance, when two devices connect and determine that they are close together, the transmitter immediately modifies its signal to the strength needed to accommodate that range. When traffic volume across a connection slows down, or stops completely, a receiving device will shift to a low power sleep mode that is intermittently interrupted for very short periods in order to maintain the network connection. The Bluetooth devices also will transmit at maximum power during ‘paring’ and possibly other times. Typically any noticeable interference (noticeable to the application being run) occurs TO the bluetooth system. The 802.11 system may have some hold-offs as a result of the Bluetooth transmitting, but usually it is not significant enough to affect any application. However, if there are a significant number of bluetooth devices in operation in the same physical area as a 802.11 device, and the power of the 802.11 networks is set low enough, there is a possibility that the 802.11 network can be affected. In Healthcare most Bluetooth devices are used for personal communications, (i.e. phone headset) and the power of the bluetooth communication stream is very low. AS a result the opportunity for interference to the 802.11 network is minimal. OK, not that I have put in so much techno-babble to confuse some folks, what about the initial question, should Bluetooth be used in healthcare areas where there are mission critical 802.11 systems? The interference between Bluetooth and 802.11 devices should be analyzed, and any interference to applications running over them should be evaluated. Most applications (even mission critical ones) will operate just fine in the presence of minor interference, but as the level of interference grows this can have negative effects on the application performance. Without testing of the application and devices, and their intended usage (density of users, number of users in same area, etc.), it is hard to determine if the level of interference is high enough to be an issue. One last note. Much like Cisco recommendations to utilize 5Ghz for voice, some healthcare 802.11 device manufacturers are moving systems to 5Ghz for the same reason. If Bluetooth is a requirement, and interference is a concern or a recognized issue, then this is an alternative for mission critical devices. Bruce AlexanderBusiness Development ManagerBorderless Network SpecialistArchitectures and Vertical TeamCisco Systemsbrucea@cisco.comSingle Number Reach: 330-523-2135
As I read have it in the USA the same health problem as also in Germany and other countries. A problem which not fast to be solved is.
Of all the industries which touch the daily lives of Americans I believe health care is already leading the way in technological integration. I can’t think of any other system (other than your local DVD rental outlet) which so early and so completely embraced computerized record-keeping, and uses information technology to expand it’s overall effectiveness on a daily basis. Frankly, I think it is a vastly overlooked and underestimated success story, the totality of technological integration into the health care industry.That said I think the true challenge, especially considering the forthcoming national health care system, will be systems compatibility, and patient information portability. Soon we will see patients (presumably) taking advantage of a variety of services from a panoply of providers, all the while under a single united health plan. Given the general public’s legitimate concern for privacy I find myself wondering what role is Cisco proposing for itself in this greater health information network? And what precautions for security is Cisco planning to take?
I think this is a great strategy by Cisco which I think will gain a lot of traction by the health care community.
Wireless communications is an essential component to ensure caregivers are not tied down to a desk. With more emphasis on the use of EHR’s something will have to replace the clip board. 802.11x has become pretty solid and the use of spread spectrum technology keeps the potential impact of interference low. Bluetooth on the other hand is still crap in my opinion. I’ve used numerous headsets, PC interfaces, phones, etc. and none of them operate with any consistency. Some ultrasound machines are arriving with Bluetooth headsets for voice command input. Total fiasco so far.
OK so we’re not going to stick to just what technology can do to cure our ailing healthcare system. Let’s deal with the big ailmenst first; none of which have anything to do with technology.1. Tort reform2. U.S. subsdizing drug company’s for R&D while the rest of the world gets a free ride.3. Stark in office exemption for imaging4. 40% of our healthcare dollar spent on the final days of life.There, solve those and we can pay for the rest. Unfortunately not a single one of those, except for item 3, are being addressed. And even item 3 is being watered down as we speak.
I have read this entire blog and is clear that there are more sick people than the money it takes to treat them.It is disappointing to note that no mention is made to prevent some of them becoming sick in the first place, and even more disappointing is the fact that no mention of the naturopaths. Are they not part of the Healthcare system?
I agree Baz, the entire effort to reform healthcare is one big disappointment. All I can see happening so far is more people will be covered under the same dysfunctional system. None of the real problems will be solved and things will only get worse.The guidelines for meaningful use of the EHR were released recently and most specialty practices will be locked out of the incentives. This is because they won’t be able to meet the mandatory requirements in the guidelines. For example a radiologist doesn’t prescribe medication, at least not in the same fashion a PCP would. Therefore they have no need for eRX and do not qualify for the incentives.So what good is an EHR if it is not complete? What good is the EHR if it doesn’t include radiology images, lab results, or pathology findings? Not much good IMO.As far as prevention goes I couldn’t agree more. One of the reasons our scores for providing care are below some other less wealthy countries is certainly due in part to Americans life style. Everything is super sized here including much of our population. We’ve done a good job reducing the number of smokers but there are plenty of other bad habits that we need to influence people to tone down. I suppose that since everyone will be required to have insurance under the governments reform plans we could charge those with bad habits more like is done with life insurance.
I am also disappointed with healthcare reform efforts. It seems as though we are moving farther away from a solution with more healthcare debate.Thanks for the post and I enjoyed reading the comments.Sincerely,Melissa
In the legal environment we deal with patients and medical records daily. Just to receive medical records can take weeks. With all the technology available I’m curious why records are not available immediately and should be emailed with the proper authorization. The patient record system is antiquated and even transfer between treating physicians and hospitals is sorely lacking.
I think this is a great strategy by Cisco which I think will gain a lot of traction by the health care community.
Medical Strategist, since you committed to final comment I won’t ask any more questions but after visiting the site I have about a million of them. Since I haven’t taken the time to really learn enough about this I won’t comment my initial impression either. I do wonder what all that has to do with fixing the U.S. care system which is what this site is supposed to be about.
at last found a place to discuss about health.really i respect your job.let me add my comment.i agree that social values n ancient medical systems must exist.but why shouldn’t we go ahead with with available IT facilities to enhance medical field. car loan modification“
Cisco as a company can contribute greatly to fields like telemedicine which will go a long way in widening the reach of healthcare to remote areas in developing countries.