Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 4:21:40 PM
My wife forwarded me
an interesting article today. It seems that a study done of 4000 hospitals shows that computerizing them has nto saved money, but actually been a net cost. This is interesting as computer record keeping is one of the ways Obama hopes ot save money. If this is true, then he might have to admit computerization is not about savings, and is all about gathering data to help implement some sort of rationing under the rubric of "cost-benefit analysis".
Of more personal interest is the conclusion that systems are mostly designed to help administrators, rather than doctors or nurses, as I said this to my wife when she showed me their new medical information system. As a former software developer I said "that's really clumsy, they must have taken input from one group and developed the whole system to suit them, and no one else." Well, it seems that is how medical systems are routinely designed, and that "someone" is the administrative staff.
I am sure I will have some additional thoughts on this in the future and will probably come back to the topic, but for now I thought it might interest my readers.