VANCOUVER - The U.S. healthcare system faces serious challenges ahead, as costs are increasingly shifted to patients, many of whom lack the ability to pay. Information technology has the potential to solve the looming crisis, but only if physicians take the lead in pushing medicine to become more automated through the adoption of healthcare IT.
Dear AuntMinnie Member,
VANCOUVER - The U.S. healthcare system faces serious challenges ahead, as costs are increasingly shifted to patients, many of whom lack the ability to pay. Information technology has the potential to solve the looming crisis, but only if physicians take the lead in pushing medicine to become more automated through the adoption of healthcare IT.
That's the advice of Dr. Leo F. Black, who as CEO of the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville helped spearhead the hospital system's adoption of healthcare IT in the 1990s. Now retired, Black shared his insights on the Mayo experience on Thursday with attendees of the annual meeting of the Symposium for Computer Applications in Radiology (SCAR).
The challenge of soaring healthcare costs will only worsen in the short term, as baby boomers age and new treatments and technologies are introduced, Black said. Addressing the problem will require the participation of a wide range of interest groups -- patients, insurers, government regulators, and lawyers -- but physicians play a key role because they are the ones who are best positioned to make fundamental changes in the way healthcare is delivered.
Behavioral change made possible by information technology is the key, Black said. In Mayo's experience, healthcare IT enabled the facility to automate the way it practiced, eliminate some FTEs, reduce its reliance on paper, and reach out to patients more efficiently.
But the process wasn't easy. Almost any healthcare facility has an institutional bias toward stasis that can be broken only if physicians, administration, and allied health providers take the risks necessary to effect fundamental change. Postponing the inevitable isn't an answer, Black believes, given the pressures that are building within the healthcare system.
Learn about the rest of the Mayo experience, and other news on cutting-edge developments in information technology, from our continuing coverage of the SCAR meeting. We'll be providing daily reports from the conference, which you'll find in our PACS Digital Community at pacs.auntminnie.com, and in our RIS Digital Community at ris.auntminnie.com.
