HIT or miss

摘要

Drew greenblatt is baffled by the technical backwardness of America's costly health system. He owns Marlin Steel Wire Products, a small firm based in Baltimore that makes components for Toyota, Roche and other multinationals. He offers good health coverage for his employees, but his health costs have nearly doubled since 2000. Last September he went to Congress to plead for legislation that would modernise the information technology used by America's medical system. "My receptionist, my shipping clerk and even the industrial robots on my factory floor use e-mail," he says, "so why can't I e-mail my doctor?"rnIt is a reasonable question. After all, America spends some 16% of its gdp on health care, the largest share of any big country. A man from Mars would certainly expect doctors in the world's most technologically advanced country to have ready access to e-mail, and probably also to sophisticated health information technologies (hit) such as electronic health records (ehrs). Put simply, ehrs are digitised versions of all the bits of paper usually kept in files by all the doctors a patient seesrnregularly, hit describes all the hardware, software and other kit needed to make sense of the data and to give remote access to them. Yet although most health-care providers have installed computer systems to deal with back-office tasks such as billing, shockingly few have modernised the bits of their business that patients like Mr Greenblatt encounter.