Michael Brewer

eMedicine: The Next Generation



Posted: Wednesday, February 03, 2010

by
Communicatia, Inc.

Remember the Palm Pilot?

That little gadget that was little more than a calculator that annoyingly went into sync-mode and froze, dead as a brick, at your computer --- kinda like an iPod does every now and then? As obsolete as it may look to today's generation of "always on" twenty-somethings, tethered to their WiFi gadgets at all times, we all owe a tap of our stylus to the next big thing in health care: eMedicine.

What started as the equivalent of Bill Gates soldering scraps of circuits in his garage to bring the first computer prototype to market, the concept of eMedicine began when two doctors decided there had to be a better way to push new medical research out to the world. Today, the term is generating buzz in the health insurance marketplace as a way to revolutionize the way doctors care for their patients in an emerging pay-for-performance medical insurance environment.

Like the 90s Internet Wunderkind of their day, Drs. Scott Plantz and Richard Lavely surely didn't expect their simple medical database would turn into an open source, interactive library of real-time medical resources that would later be sold for millions to WebMD. But that's precisely how one of the nation's most recognizable health related Web portals lifted off into cyberspace. Today, eMedicine is a subsidiary of WebMD, housed and maintained by an editorial board of top physicians throuought the U.S. But with efficiency becoming the make or break benchmark by which doctors and hospitals deliver health care, the broad concept of eMedicine is evolving into a way of life for those in health care.

Take a look at the mergers and acquisitions in health care today. After President Obama laid down his mandate for all medical insurance and health care providers to convert to paperless systems, IT firms looking to score a lucrative contract with the U.S. government or a corporate hospital chain are wrapping all their human bandwidth around the issue. Many of these companies have no previous health care experience, aside from getting an annual physical from their family doctor. But, as Planz and Lavely have proven, by taking mountains of hard cover medical encyclopedias and turning them over to the Internet, these IT pros know where there's a will, there's a way.

In the very near future, look for health insurance plans to serve up mandates of their own to cut out massive waste and embarrassing opportunities for fraud in their pipelines. Many of the biggest  health insurance plans  will migrate to a paperless Explanation of Benefits (EIBs) system, reducing their postage costs. Others who use a third-party prescription management company will deny benefits for prescriptions that aren't submitted electronically.

The risk in a real time society like ours is that long term problems often suffer from short term solutions. Medical records are lost when a laptop goes missing. Identity theft creeps into the servers where our most private information can be easily accessed. Errors in the operating room due to a bad keystroke can add to the already crippling pile of malpractice lawsuits clogging our courts.

Like it or not, medicine is being pulled into the future and there's a lot we can gain from a more streamlined delivery of medical care through electronic avenues. But the U.S. medical care system is not on life support, as some critics would suggest. With all its opportunities for improvement, we should hold our thought leaders in health care accountable and insist they give some deliberate thought on how they get there.

This Article has been viewed 38 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.