Skip to main content

Reinventing Rural Health Care

A thoughtful article from futurist Ian Morrison on Reinventing Rural Health Care.

Among Morrison's excellent recommendations is a high-tech approach to rural health care:

"Rural communities have as much right to high-quality health care as the rest of us. But the answer can't simply be providing sufficient cost-based reimbursement to keep all systems doing what they are doing, especially if they are under scale for true quality care. In my view, the solutions will come through a reinvention of rural health care delivery, including:
  • imaginative use of contemporary information and communications technology;

  • regionalized quality improvement initiatives;

  • rationalized deployment of clinical technology and human resources."
I'm struck by the many innovative, simple, low-cost models and mobile technologies already at work in rural areas. The problem is they're in central Africa, not central Iowa. We're stuck with a Hill-Burton driven, cost-reimbursement-fueled edifice complex where it's easier to spend $20 million on a fancy new building than $20 thousand on mobile technology to help diabetics better manage their disease.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...
3 comments
Read more