According to TED: The faults of healthcare information services

It was about halfway through Jody Ranck’s lecture last Tuesday night when I heard him refer to somebody named Ted.  I did not know who this “Ted” was, which was quite annoying, for I had remembered that the past two lectures before Mr. Ranck also mentioned this mysterious Ted fellow.  Was Ted the world’s smartest man?  I would assume he was, considering the amount of knowledge he must possess in order to be referenced in lectures about climate change, education in the classroom, and now global health care services.  I came to the conclusion that Ted must be a superhero, who only goes by the name Ted when he is not flying around the world picking up bits of knowledge in various fields.  Thus I was a little disappointed when I actually googled “Ted” and found that he had no supernatural powers.  “Ted” was not even a single person.  TED, standing for technology, entertainment, and design, is a series of conferences held across the world that strive to promote innovative ideas, or as the conference’s tag line reads: Ideas worth spreading.  In regards to health care and information systems, which was the topic of Mr. Ranck’s lecture, TED has a series of conferences titled TEDMED.  The conferences feature speakers and authors who have specialized and experienced the real world applications of innovation in health information systems.  One of these speakers was Eric Dishman, a high-level Intel employee.  Dishman gave a lecture at TEDMED (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3OhcpK-UBc)  that discussed how healthcare services need to become more personalized in order to be more both cost and performance efficient (This was one of the major themes of Mr. Ranck’s lecture as well).  Dishman tells the story of a 90-year old woman, who after suffering a broken pelvis from a fall, ends up dying because a doctor prescribed her a drug (Tylenol), which the elderly woman was allergic to.  Dishman then revels the elderly woman was his wife’s grandmother and makes the point that if medical confusion can happen to someone who was wealthy, connected, and spoke English, then it could happen more frequently to billions of people across the globe who did not have the same resources as Dishman’s grandmother.  Dishman’s solution is to have a chip developed that would keep track of everyone’s personal medical information.  A chip like this, Dishman argues, would have prevented the death of the old woman.  This shift to personalized health care was featured in this week’s reading, and can be compared to the shift that occurred in computing in recent history.  In the 1970’s, computers were big and bulky.  They were not connected to each other, and only experts operated them.  Yet as technology advanced, the computer became more personalized to the average person.  The computer became smaller.  Computers became interconnected to each other through the Internet, and now anyone can use a computer, not just experts (remember the OLPC program last week).  The same thing needs to happen with healthcare services and information.  Right now healthcare services are big and bulky.  Healthcare services are not interconnected.  Healthcare services are not personalized.  Mr. Ranck spoke of how we allow certain aspects of healthcare to be personalized (insulin shots), but that the vast majority of healthcare is still performed inefficiently.  Healthcare information is not transferable from different medial centers, which is part of the reason why Dishman’s grandmother died.  An institution such as TED is working to digitalize all the healthcare information in order to make it more connected across the world.  The central conclusion of Dishman’s lecture is that healthcare needs to be moved away from expensive, inefficient institutional bureaucracies, or as Dishman calls them, the mainframe. 

            A second video lecture  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCGlWQnzDVE) on TEDMED continues the idea that information is the area that presents the most problems to global health care.  Thomas Goetz of the Decision Tree think tank argues that healthcare is not a science problem, but in fact an information problem.  He also echoes the sentiment of Mr. Dishman that people can start personalizing more of their healthcare.  He uses the example of how people personalize the work of a dentist office by brushing and flossing everyday.  He argues that people need more information in order for each person to make a better-personalized choice regarding their health.  He states that most people do not understand their choices, and according to Mr. Goetz, most doctors do not know either.  He suggests that doctors do not take the time to learn about how their patients can personalize their healthcare because they will make the most amount of money if healthcare remains almost completely institutionalized.