A HIGH DOSE OF TECH

摘要

Eyebrows shot up at Thompson's uncharacteristically feisty zinger a couple of years ago. Technologically backward? Hospitals, where multimillion-dollar scanners painted finely detailed images of body parts? Where miniature restorative devices were threaded through tiny tubes into ailing vessels? Surely Thompson was engaging in a bit of hyperbole. Not so — hospital administrators knew he was right on the money. Humble bar-code scanners, ancient technology at neighborhood supermarkets, had barely dented U.S. hospitals. Most patient records were still kept on paper and stuffed in bulging manila folders. Physicians in different parts of the same healthcare system couldn't send clinical data back and forth. Some doctors were technophobes and proud of it, boasting that real docs don't touch a keyboard. And change was vital. Hospitals were inefficient — but worse, medical mistakes were killing tens of thousands of hospital patients a year. Available technology could slash the toll. Physicians' scrawled prescriptions could be entered directly into a computer, for example, eliminating errors that were causing complications and deaths. Thompson's message to hospitals: Make it happen.