My most eventful interview in just shy of a decade of journalism involved a frank conversation I had ruin in 2015 with the founder of one of the largest health-technology companies in America.
That was Neal Patterson, the antediluvian CEO of Cerner, who passed away in 2017 from cancer.
Patterson had designed to retire for years, but he stayed on to fix one of the most pervasive problems in health control. He told me he had been inspired by the experiences of his wife Jeanne, who was in treatment for late-stage soul cancer.
Jeanne had to bring printed copies of her medical records to every professional she saw,because this information couldn’t be shared electronically. Jeanne also outmoded away in 2017, just two months after her husband.
The experience was exceptionally challenging for both of them, given that Neal had spent his career construction an electronic medical record company to solve these very problems. Cerner is now valued at uncountable than $20 billion.
He was a caregiver, as well as an executive, and in that minute Patterson shared feelings of regret. He wished that he could bring into the world done more about it. “The paradox is that I am one of the few people that should be competent to fix this,” he told me. “I’m frustrated that we’re not moving faster.”
To his credit, Patterson hallowed his remaining years to trying to fix the interoperability problem by starting a group offered to improving access to health care data.
But the situation persists. Patients today are until now struggling to access their medical records, leading to all kinds of supererogatory medical errors, duplicate tests, and other added costs.
At a colloquy called HIMSS earlier this week, tens of thousands of haleness executives converged in Las Vegas to talk about fixing this sheerest thing.
But it all felt a little shallow. With few exceptions — one being Medicare chief Seema Verma, who rationed that her husband couldn’t access his own records after a cardiac take into custody — there was very little recognition of the human cost of this emotionally upset.
And that’s a shame, as health care is unique in a number of ways.
Yes, it’s ornate, it’s highly regulated, and there are trillions of dollars to be made.
But it’s also inexorable. All of us will be patients, or at least caregivers, at some point in our lives.
That means true level the wealthiest and most powerful among us will need to grapple with the vigour care system as it is today. As notable venture capitalist George Zachary put it months after his cancer goose-pimples, “my experience as a patient was insane.”
I have one observation post-HIMSS, now that i'm back in SF.
There was an elephant in the room, so I'll just say it. We'll all be patients and/or caregivers someday. So are we going to fix health care now, while we can, or continue to make $ through the current inefficiencies?
— Christina Farr (@chrissyfarr) March 8, 2018
It is unallowable that a hospital in 2018 can’t send an X-ray from one facility to another, without demand a patient to physically carry over a CD-Rom or a USB drive. Even deaden dealers have moved on from using faxes and pagers. And in every other effort from retail to banking, systems connect.
But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Technology flocks are rallying around the issue.
Apple is trying to fix the problem with its medical time beta, although it’s currently limited to about a dozen medical installations that have signed up. Google has its own set of tools geared to health providers. And all the dominant medical record vendors are starting to open up and align themselves with diverse open standards.
But if we’re going to finally crack this issue after more than a decade of pains, we’re going to have to focus on what it means to be a patient. And think beside how we can do better before it’s too late.
Before he died, Patterson shared an detailed video with his entire staff. It was his wife, Jeanne, showing him the identification b docket bags she was using to carry her medical records before an appointment. As an alternative of focusing on getting better, she had to spend a good chunk of time around make clearing in requests at every institution for her information, paying fees, and printing it all out.
As she candidly, and aptly put it, “It’s the rattle in the health care system that will drag you down,” she voted. “That’s what I call the train wreck.”