Healthcare, technology and the election

Last week I watched the Democratic debate on CNN. Healthcare (and the Economy) seems to be one of the hot topics. I downloaded both candidate’s platform and was reading about their healthcare plans. Interesting that both support the use of technology on this issue

CLINTON: Ensure That All Providers and Plans Use Privacy-Protected Information Technology: The proposal will give doctors financial incentives to adopt health information technology and facilitate adoption of a system where high quality care and better patient outcomes can be rewarded. The RAND Corporation estimates net savings from the use of information technology to be $77 billion per year. Recently, the Business Roundtable, SEIU, and AARP estimated that “widespread adoption [of such IT reforms] raises the potential savings to $165 billion annually.”

OBAMA: Lowering Costs Through Investment in Electronic Health Information Technology Systems: Most medical records are still stored on paper, which makes it hard to coordinate care, measure quality or reduce medical errors and which costs twice as much as electronic claims. Obama will invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records, and will phase in requirements for full implementation of health IT.

With that said, it appears Google is getting a head start on this initiative. Guest blogger Dana on IanSchafer.com posted a great take on Google’s investment in online personal health records business. Google has started a pilot project that will test the exchange of patient data between the Cleveland Clinic and Google technology. They are collaborating in an effort to enroll between 1,500 and 10,000 patients in the pilot project.

My sister and brother-in-law are teachers in the Cleveland Public Schools and their health care plan includes the Cleveland Clinic. In fact, my niece and nephew were born at the Clinic. My nephew was conceived through in vitro fertilisation, so I am sure my sister has a lengthy medical record…wonder how they are choosing which patients they work with?

PS – Microsoft has also started a similar project called Health Vault. If anyone from Siemens PLM Software is reading this…shouldn’t we be talking to both MS & Google about using Teamcenter?!?!?

PSS – So … if Hilary wins the office, expect a Microsoft Helathcare system and if Obama wins, expect a Google based system. It only makes sense since Microsoft employees have donated a total of about $130,000 to Clinton. At Google, donations favored Obama over the New York senator by $97,771 to $46,610. Money talks right?