Can technology lower health care costs? George Pantos, Executive Director, Healthcare Performance Management Institute, former deputy undersecretary of Commerce, and former general counsel to the Self-Insurance Institute of America, raises the issue in a must-read op-ed in The Orange County Register. Here’s a small part of it:
With his health care overhaul stalled, President Barack Obama has challenged America to come up with alternatives. “You got a better idea? Bring it on,” he recently announced. A televised summit meeting on health care ideas is scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 25.
A suggestion. Why not focus on streamlining health costs by harnessing technology that allows companies to take control of their healthcare expenses?
Businesses generally lack the data necessary to measure and manage their health costs, even though health care often represents their second- or third-biggest expense. Indeed, executives have a better sense of how much money they spend on office supplies than they do of where their health-plan dollars are going. But with the cost of health benefits projected to increase 7 percent in 2010 — and to double over the next seven years — businesses can no longer afford such willful ignorance.
Some firms have a stake in preserving the costly status quo. Look no further than the insurance industry, whose top five companies recently announced record profits that were 56 percent higher than last year’s. Insurers’ business models are largely based on keeping American firms in the dark – that is, preventing them from analyzing their own health care data and using the results to find alternative benefit structures that may offer better outcomes at lower cost.
Companies have tackled customer relations and supply-chain management with technology-driven strategies. So why not do the same for health benefits?
Go to the link to read the rest — and the details.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.