Brave New Information Highway

Campus Report ^ | April 2, 2009 | Heather Latham

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Brave New Information Highway

by: Heather Latham, April 02, 2009

Because of the inefficient nature of paper records in healthcare, many hospitals and facilities have turned to a computerized system as reform. David Snow, Chairman and CEO of Medco, spoke at a recent AEI event and discussed this topic. He listed three guidelines for reform:

• “Keep it simple. If you make it complicated, people don’t understand it. They will reject it;”

• “Change has to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. We will not get Big Bang for healthcare reform. We won’t—for two reasons: Big Bang gets everybody up against it all at the same time and they clock any meaningful reform. We’ve all seen that. But, equally important, meaningful healthcare reform requires that we take a long-term view. We build our solutions; it’s a building block approach. The foundational building block is a wired system. And I’m going to try to prove that to you today; ” and

• “Finally, I do believe meaningful healthcare reform comes from government and private sector working together and recognizing their roles. In my view—and there’s plenty of examples to show that this is true—the government has to create, I call it, guardrails on the highway, under which the private sector can perform. So they have to promulgate, they have to regulate, and when they do that, it’s amazing how the private sector comes in and does what they’re good at—which is to operate and to innovate. It is a partnership. It’s a very different partnership, its roles and responsibilities and having a wired system requires promulgation of something and we’ve had examples of that in the past that have led to great improvements in healthcare.”...