Two years ago we facilitated a wiki for the World Health Care congress, an experience that gave me a deep dive into the health care industry. A laggard in adopting technology, there was significant focus on electronic medical records as a cost cutter, less to slice through bureaucracy, but compared to alternative reforms it required zero political courage.
So it is refreshing to find someone in health care talking about blogs, wikis and transparency:
Openness causes accountability. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that hospitals are killing hundreds of thousands of people each year through medical errors. It was a chilling reality that clearly demonstrated that every hospital should publish its mortality rates, infection rates and readmission rates. It was a telling story of the power of secrecy and conversely of the power of transparency.
So, the national electronic medical record is already predictably doomed to a loss of 6,020,000 human souls as we simply calculate the 2 percent miss rate. The equivalent to 40,000 757 airplanes dropping out of the air each year, fully loaded.
Let’s force transparency in health care, and insurance, and the building industry and the investment industry and law. Well, you probably see where I’m coming from on this one.
I'm sure the vendors of electronic medical records sold increased accuracy as a primary value proposition, just like how Diebold sold votes electronic voting.
