Blog#1

Matt Tenaglia

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vnsny-uses-advanced-technology-to-assess-in-home-performance-of-nurses-and-incorporate-new-medical-research-to-improve-patient-care-104704649.html

This article talks about New York and its effort to integrate Information Technology into it’s health care. They use feedback and other applications to find out what treatments are having what effects on home rehab patients as fast possible. This lead to a 10% reduction in patients having to be hospitalized and a more efficient system.

This article was intriguing to me because, I’ve had relatives who have been in a situation where they had to be cared for from home. I feel that a system like this could greatly have benefitted my grandfather. Also I think that this is one of the first small steps for IT in the healthcare industry. The potential for IT in the healthcare industry is enormous. I found the feedback aspect unique, the article claimed that they average around 22,000 hits per year. I feel like patient feedback is an obvious requirement for all treatments, but how did they retain feedback before this program? Or did they get any at all? Also this new system allows the company, through a series of algorithms, to determine which patients are best suited for home care and which patients need to remain hospitalized. This streamlines their process as well as saves valuable resources by sending a patient home to rehab, who will only be sent back to the hospital shortly after. My argument is why hasn’t the health care world done things of this magnitude sooner? Why don’t I have something similar to a flash drive that contains all my past medical records, instead of some folder back in Boston? How long will it take for a hospital in Baltimore to reach my medical information in Boston? I know there are a lot of Health Care reforms in the works with this new presidency and that every state has their own laws. A lot of the health care budget for technology isn’t directed at information technology but more along the improving machines/devices as well as biotechnology. But I feel that the Health Care industry is so reliant upon knowing as much information as possible about the individual patient, this industry was built for Information Technology to thrive upon. All these reward cards for the retail industry track exactly what we buy and what we buy repeatedly. Why can’t we have a card similar to this, for every time we check into a doctors office, hospital, or clinic so that it’s all stored. I know this would be a huge undertaking to convert into a system. The population could be eased into it over time to reduce the confusion. Not only would this make patient care easier, it would be more accurate nd have faster response time. It would only increase patient care and quality, just as the small scale system VNSNY is using has.