BusinessWeek Makes ‘Medical Guesswork’ Cover Story
BusinessWeek comes with a series of front page articles on the state of medicine still being more of an art than fact-based science. There’s a long profile of Dr. David Eddy which, while interesting, does not cover much new ground over material already published elsewhere such as this CIO Insight article from three years ago. Still, it is a good reminder that much remains to be done to homogenize quality of care towards higher levels. Dr. Eddy is the director of Archimedes, a software model that simulates how patients would fare with their virtual organs, conditions, doctor interactions and treatments. He has dedicated his career to using mathematics to assess how well medical treatments lead to better health outcomes. Eddy has argued time and again that evidence-based medicine was necessary to reduce costs and even prevent common but potentially harmful procedures.
BusinessWeek then covers the industrialization of medicine, noting for instance that uneven hand hygiene, while known for more than a century to spread infections, is still far too prevalent with doctors who should know better. The magazine attributes this to financial incentives. While some insurance companies fund infection prevention programs at hospitals, doctors get more fees by seeing more patients and performing more procedures, regardless of whether they adhere to standards - such as spotless hand hygiene - which might slow them down. The model favors volume and intervention rather than prevention. Another controversial issue is to what extent healthcare can be standardized. A third article based on findings by Dr. Elliot S. Fisher of Dartmouth Medical School shows that more healthcare spending sometimes actually brings higher risks of death because of counter-productive overuse.
May 23, 2006 Related topics: People, Quality, Safety, Errors, Evaluation & assessment, Cost savings