BusinessWeek warns against digital medicine

Filed under Health Care, by Stephen Baker on April 27

As a tech reporter, I have to admit I was a little taken aback to see the in-depth report in BusinessWeek, The Dubious Promise of Digital Medicine. The piece makes the case that the government push for e-health, funded by billions in stimulus money, is likely to lead to a patchwork of electronic systems which will:

1) Have trouble communicating with each other
2) Propagate errors
3) Lead to waste
4) Force smart health professionals to meet the stubborn and (and often foolish) dictates of machines
5) Enrich countless lobbyists

To which I reply, right, right, right, right. And it is through that often painful process that huge industries overhaul their communications.

Think about the rest of industry in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Professionals who were masters with pens and typewriters and adding machines had to bend to the dictates of IT staffs. Different systems couldn’t talk to each other. Major companies blew billions installing hugely complex enterprise resource programs (ERP) made by companies such SAP and Oracle. It was horribly painful, frightfully expensive, wasteful—and absolutely necessary.

Yes, it would be wonderful first to learn all the hard lessons of health-care reform, and then to apply them intelligently. But the automation of our industries advances through evolution, not intelligent design.