President-elect wants to computerize the nation’s health care records in five years. But the plan comes with a hefty price tag, and specialized labor is scarce.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.

Here’s the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline.

Sounds good. But it won’t be easy.

In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. And some experts say that serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed first. Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology.

“The hard part of this is that we can’t just drop a computer on every doctor’s desk,” said Dr. David Brailer, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, who served as President Bush’s health information czar from 2004 to 2006. “Getting electronic records up and running is a very technical task.”

It also won’t come cheap. Independent studies from Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund have shown that such a plan could cost at least $75 billion to $100 billion over the ten years they think the hospitals would need to implement program.

That’s a huge amount of money — since the total cost of the stimulus plan is estimated to cost about $800 billion, the health care initiative would be one of the priciest parts to the plan.

The biggest cost will be paying and training the labor force needed to create the network. Luis Castillo, senior vice president of Siemens Healthcare, a company that designs health care technology, said the laborers will have the extremely difficult task of designing a a system that “thinks like a physician.”

“Doctors cannot spend hours and hours learning a new system,” said Castillo. “It needs to be a ubiquitous, ‘anytime, anywhere’ solution that has easily accessible data in a simple-to-use Web-based application.”

But highly skilled health information technology professionals are as rare as they come, and many IT workers will need to be trained as health technology experts.

Early government estimates showed about 212,000 jobs could be created from this program, but Brailer said there simply aren’t that many Americans who are qualified.

Furthermore, ensuring the privacy of patients’ records in a nationalized computer network will be tricky. There are obvious concerns about hackers and system failures. And new online health record systems, such as Google Health are not currently subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the national health privacy law.

“HIPAA was never intended for the digital age, because the laws never anticipated the emergence of Web-based records,” said Brailer. “Congress can pass one of numerous policy proposals for change, it’s just a question if they have the will to do that.”

The Obama transition operation declined a request to elaborate on Obama’s proposal. The president-elect said Thursday in a speech on the economy thatthe benefits of a modernized national health record system go beyond just cost savings.

“This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests,” said Obama. “It just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs — it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system,” he added.

Still, compared to the $2 trillion a year that the industry spends, the$100 billion experts say it may cost to implement Obama’s planis a drop in the bucket.

“We must reduce waste to become more efficient” said Brailer.

The savings of such a plan could be substantial. Brailer estimates that a fully computerized health record system could save the industry $200 billion to $300 billion a year.

That could ultimately slow the rapid rise of health care premiums, which have cut into Americans’ paychecks. While wages are rising at a rate of around 3% a year, health care costs are growing at about three times that rate.

“Obama’s support for electronic medical records is one of the key efforts of health reform that actually will deliver lower costs for hard-working American families,” said Larry McNeely, a health care advocate at U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “Long-term savings can’t happen unless we have 21st century health information technology.”

Massachusetts has developed a plan to fully computerize records at its 14,000 physicians’ offices by 2012 and its 63 hospitals by 2014. After a pilot program, the state legislature estimates it will cost about $340 million to build the statewide computer system, with a cost of about $2 million per hospital.

“[Obama's] timeframe is very ambitious, but there is a need to be able to track data on patients and talk across providers and health care systems,” said Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, Secretary of Health and Human Services for Massachusetts. “The program will allow for greater patient safety.”

Some say some of the hard work has begun. The Bush administration laid much of the groundwork for the program, leading to several pilot programs in a handful of states, as well as a standardization of medical records.

“The whole structure has already been developed,” said Stephen Schoenbaum, executive director of The Commonwealth Fund’s commission on a high performance health system. “It’s feasible to at least make a lot of progress on this in the next five years.”

[via CNN Money] by David Goldman

Yesterday I gave a high-level overview of Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Report for 2008.  Today I want to underscore a few more of the findings about blogging and brands, the growing credibility of blogs, and the active role of bloggers in other online activities.

The research shows that brands make up a major part of bloggers’ online conversations. “More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they love or hate. Even day-to-day experiences with customer care or in a retail store are fodder for blog posts. Companies are already reaching out to bloggers: one-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates.”

The Technorati research also shows a general sense amongst bloggers that blogs are being taken more seriously as information sources.

37% of bloggers have been quoted in traditional media based on a blog post. Half of bloggers believe that blogs will be a primary source for news and entertainment in the next five years. Bloggers are less bullish on the prospects for traditional media — one in five bloggers don’t think that newspapers will survive the next ten years.

Bloggers are active Web 2.0 participants, using a variety of Web 2.0 tools.

Blogger Participation in Web 2.0 Activities

Bloggers are generally the first to learn about new web technologies and applications, such as RSS and Twitter. On average, bloggers participate in five of the ten Web 2.0 activities listed, with one-third regularly conducting more than seven Web 2.0 activities.

[via Grown Up Digital] by Don Tapscott

Don Tapscott is just another guy you NEED to know about. As one of the world’s leading authorities on business strategy, he opens discussion about the Net Generation, or NetGen. His main emphasis is on how information technology changes business, government and society. He is the author or co-author of 13 widely read books, including Wikinomics, which was the best selling management book in the United States in 2007 and is now translated into 22 languages. He is Chairman of nGenera Insight, a global business innovation company, headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Don directs several of nGenera Insight’s research and education programs, which serve a marquee list of Global 2000 customers. Tapscott is also an adjunct Professor at the J.L. Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto.

Phew. (Lots of props to Tapscott’s website for all this info: GrownUpDigital.com)

About The Book: Poised to transform every social institution, the Net Generation is reshaping the form and functions of school, work, and even democracy. Simply put, the wave of youth, aged 12-30, the first truly global generation, is impacting all institutions. Particularly, employers, instructors, parents, marketers and political leaders are finding it necessary to adapt to the changing social fabric due to this generation’s unique characteristics. Within its comprehensive examination of the Net Generation, and based on a 4.5 million dollar study, Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital offers valuable insight and concrete takeaways for leaders across all social institutions.

Grown Up Digital explores:

• How the Net Generation can be the most innovative, collaborative, and productive cohort, if given the proper working environment. From company ethic to leadership style, Grown Up Digital examines, in-depth, what this new organization will look like.
• The benefits of a shift from a traditional, broadcast model of education to one that is customized, collaborative and interactive
• How the Net Generation’s ability to scrutinize and investigate is forcing a new model of democracy that will have to be transparent, collaborative and engaging
• How parents, teachers, and elder influencers can engage in open and informative discussions to ensure technology is properly used
• How marketers no longer control their brands and how to cope with this power shift that affords the advantage to the consumer

Download The Introductory Chapter Here

Buy The Book