Healthcare It News: Where Medicine And It Meet

By Author: Jaun Paul
Total Articles: 53
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Healthcare IT vendors should make it a point to stay abreast of the latest healthcare IT news doing the rounds. Here's something HIT vendors can take note of if they want to sell their wares to physicians.


Medicine and IT certainly meet somewhere. This was very much evident at a recently-held meeting of President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).


At the meeting, Google CEO Eric Schmidt had engaged physician and health policy expert Dr Atul Gawande in a witty exchange. The doctor had recently published a book - The Checklist Manifesto - which promotes checklists as a way to improve health care quality and at the same time bring down delivery costs.


Schmidt responded by asking Gawande to imagine how it would be like to visit a doctor five years down the line. For the Google CEO, in his ideal world, what would happen is that the doctor would type in the symptoms she observes and it would be matched against the data in this repository. Then this knowledge engine would use best practices, and ...
... all the knowledge everywhere to give physicians some sort of standardized guidance. It baffles him why medicine has not organized itself around these platform opportunities.


Responding to this, Gawande said that it is not surprising at all as most of the systems or guidelines are not in usable form. According to the doctor, part of the ‘bafflement' occurs because the folks who know how to make such systems do not understand how the clinical encounter actually operates.


The doctor said a usable application for an iPone or whatever the new Google one is would really be of great benefit for a doctor like him as he diagnoses a patient.


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