claims, claims, claims (business and education)

As health care technology advances, the older health care technologies become cheaper. Let's take for example an x-ray versus an MRI. The x-ray at the time it was first introduced was a big deal. You could see bone structure. Now MRIs enable easy viewing of bones, muscles, ligaments, etc. X-rays now are cheap (maybe a few hundred dollars- cheap relative to the medical imaging world). MRIs cost thousands of dollars. But because of the advancement x-rays are cheaper and better imaging is out there if needed.

I found a few websites making different claims on how to reduce health care costs. One site talks about how digital data entry and insurance claims entry machines will reduce health care cost. The thing is that the site is a PR log and the article was most likely written by a company representative of E*Healthline.com, which is making such a technology. The article has random statistics that make the information system seem like such a necessity. You have to remember the bias of the source. I kind of believe that digital records will reduce costs, but I did beleive that before I read the article.

Another site mentions how health information technology, individual ability of a patient to research home care, digital health databases, and prescribing medication digitally from the doctor directly to the pharmacy. The site is a ".com" so some sponsors most likely influenced this article. There is no concrete evidence presented in the article either, but I still think that digital databases for records will reduce cost. I am skeptical about the other claims, although they are logical, because they have no facts in the article.

A different website mentions a digital health records database as well as a way to evaluate new technologies in terms of their net gain. The health records database seems like a good thing. The article did not really provide numbers on the benefits of a digital system, but it seems to be a general conclusion that it will reduce costs. The implication of grading technologies in terms of net gain can be difficult. How can you say doing this procedure has risks (like death), but it has benefits (like cutting someone's recuperation time by six months)? I agree that evaluation could lower costs, but how many technologies would never be improved if the world thought that way. It's a tricky game. The site is educational and from the University of San Francisco. It just evaluates a paper that a professor wrote in 2007, so it's tech-saviness is off, while the ideas remain the same. It kind of plugs the university a little more than the topic of reducing costs.


http://origin.arstechnica.com/articles/culture/electronic-health-records.media/Immune_auto.png

http://www.prlog.org/10198630-ehealthline-reduces-health-care-administrative-cost-while-increasing-efficiency.html

http://www.howtodothings.com/health-fitness/how-information-technology-can-reduce-the-cost-of-health-care

http://news.ucsf.edu/releases/better-review-of-new-technology-is-needed-to-reduce-health-costs/