« Welcome to Fusion Healthcare | Main | TeraMedica signs partnership agreement with Compressus to improve clinical workflow »
04/15/2009
IT Investments for naught unless they cut healthcare costs, says Greenspan
Will the massive investment in healthcare IT will be meaningless in a global economy if the technology doesn't rein in runaway costs because healthcare spending is unsustainable in the current economic climate? According to former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan this may be the case.
Simply pumping more dollars into Medicare will not solve the healthcare crisis in America. "We have to find a way to curtail the federal funding," Greenspan said in a keynote address to the annual HIMSS conference, and perhaps IT is that way.
"If you cannot solve the overall funding problem, the [global] competitive issue will be quite secondary," Greenspan said. "There's going to be a clash invariably because resources are not going to be as ample as they have been."
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
Dr. Greenspan may be a very good economist and banker, but he understands little about the funding of healthcare. On the surface, government funding of healthcare is exploding. In real dollars that is true, but before we start to cut spending, we need to understand where we are spending this money.
If the U.S. spends more than 30% above what other countries spend on healthcare per capita, and they provide universal coverage with better outcomes on almost every measure, it is very difficult to understand how we cannot afford healthcare. Intuitively, there must be much waste in the system. Without pointing fingers, we know that our administrative costs are the highest in the world, we make terrible use of information technology, and Wennberg's studies (Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare) prove we provide much inappropriate and unnecessary care. There is much we can do to make our healthcare system more efficient. Just saying we need to cut spending is not a very scientific nor effective way to address our healthcare needs in an economic downturn.
Posted by: Barry Chaiken, MD | 04/16/2009 at 02:25 PM