Position statement
IBM is driving the transformation of healthcare with IT and the growth of a new market for our business. When a patient walks into doctor's office or hospital today, they are greeted with a clipboard and a paper form. The paper trail continues behind the curtain. The clipboard is more common than the computer in the healthcare sector. Doctors read charts, write prescriptions, and phone reports. Patients are forced to carry their clinical history from doctor-to-doctor. Public agencies get clinical reports by phone, postcard, and in the case of drug applications, by the truckload.
Information technology could improve healthcare quality and productivity and reduce medical errors. Challenges as routine as a getting prescription and as ominous as bioterrorism could be addressed if clinical data flowed electronically. IBM has powerful tools used in manufacturing, financial services, and other sectors that could save lives, reduce costs, and improve convenience in healthcare. Open standards, interoperability, the internet all are building blocks of a better healthcare system.
Our challenge, in IBM Governmental Programs, is to convince governments to improve healthcare through better use of information technology and to adopt one uniform standard for transmitting electronic health information.
- First, we need to drive the adoption of standards and interoperability. The government and private sector need to identify standards that can be used to share health information. Where standards are not adequate, we need to develop or modify standards.
- Second, the federal government is already connected to local healthcare everywhere through reporting requirements. Every hospital and physician is required to submit healthcare data to satisfy Medicare requirements, public health reporting, or FDA oversight. Unfortunately, this data is collected in a variety of formats, often on paper, and can not be shared back with doctors or patients to empower their care. By unifying the reporting requirements, without adding any new ones, the reporting burden can be reduced and facilitate shared information from virtually every hospital and physician in the country.
- Third, we need to fund the development of an infrastructure for exchanging health information, and then learn through demonstrations and prototypes to improve healthcare. Transforming healthcare with information technology will benefit from ongoing learning with each stage of health information exchange providing a foundation for the next.
Finally, reimbursement will need to be reformed to incent physicians, hospitals, and other providers to better use information technology. Governments need to provide reimbursement for quality and productivity improvements enabled by information technology, instead of the incentives that have lead to today's crisis. Government policy also needs to focus on enhancing the doctor-patient relationship and on reimbursing for wellness initiatives and chronic disease management policy that promotes patient-centric care. This model, known as the medical home model, leads to better health care outcomes and lowering the cost of delivering health care.
