What Will Prove to be the Killer App in Health Care

As we speed towards the status quo of Health Care cost increases at one percent of GDP every few years, I wonder what will levers can be pulled to slow the trend and give us hope of reversing it. Most traditional enterprise HIT professionals are looking to partner and acquire, but this simply - in the short term anyway - lends to a higher spend. Interesting perspective on consolidation in the enterprise HIT marketplace: http://www.thelundreport.org/resource/is_our_healthcare_system_headed_toward_creative_destruction

Sure, the infrastructure is necessary and someday with the right BI tools will help health care professionals from a policy and practice perspective. But the ability of health care constituents to use such information to reduce the cost of care largely depends upon the revenue streams, and those are defined by payers (private and the government).

Health reform bill? Well, without cost controls as part of the equation, it's unlikely that our free fall of an unsustainable financial burden without - and here's the kicker - actually increasing the quality of health for Americans. But, there are a few bright spots. Previously in this blog you've been subject to an unrelenting call-out regarding information technology that enables patients to adopt sustainable, healthy habits. There's the VA. And there's the concept of ACOs (accountable health organizations) that measure (and focus attention) providers' actual care outcome, as opposed to the traditional treatment. And this measurement would not be possible without certain HIT tools. So we've come full circle as to the importance of HIT to slow down the runaway train of health care spending. Whether it will be used correctly and rid us of this identical debate every decade is anybodies guess.

Primer on ACOs here: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1009040