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When my daughter was born, she was given all the standard tests, pricks, and prods given a newborn, and I was sent on my way with a stack of paperwork and records. I was informed that the state of Texas would keep track of her immunizations in their database, but there was also a small slip of paper, a lab slip, for me to bring to our first appointment with her pediatrician. This lab slip ordered a follow up blood test, standard procedure in the state to check for certain disorders and conditions. We went to that appointment and the pediatrician informed me that her office didn’t have a lab, so I needed to take the slip to another facility.
My daughter is now three, and I still don’t know what happened to that stupid lab slip. As a sleep-deprived mother of a newborn I was expected to cart around one small slip of paper, the size of an index card, from location to location, call the lab to set an appointment, then call the office to get the results. Happily, my daughter saw another doctor later who did the test in office and everything came back clear, but as a dazed mother, freshly home from the hospital, it was clear the system had a gaping hole for human error.
This hole, handing slips to patients and pharmacists and practitioners, is not just inconvenient, it can be deadly. In February of 2012 a British man died of an allergic reaction to penicillin “because a sticky note was covering a warning in his drug records.” A little slip of paper was the difference between life and death.
So what is the solution to this plague of papers clogging our healthcare arteries? While perhaps there is no perfect solution, the market is bringing two ideas together in a way that can drastically reduce mistakes, improve outcomes, and cut costs. Those two concepts are cloud computing and big data.
Cloud Computing in Healthcare
The last dentist I saw did all my x-rays digitally, and when another specialist needed to see inside my teeth he simply opened the secure digital files from my dentist. As a consumer, the convenience was great but even more important was saving a few hundred dollars on repeat, redundant x-rays. If, when my daughter was born, her medical records were all kept electronically on a secure cloud, I wouldn’t have had a lab order slip to lose. Instead of handing over a necessary, tiny piece of paper, doctors have the ability to access patient instructions, send lab requests straight to the lab through secure connections, and take out that one point of human error. Extrapolate that over the entire medical, dental, and pharmaceutical industry and the potential cost savings are astronomical, the potential for error reduction, spectacular.
The cloud is a game changer for several reasons. First, cloud computing allows easy access to information. Potential life-threatening allergies can be flagged in bright red from iPad to Android device, from the hospital to the care facility, assuring that sticky notes aren’t impeding communication of life-saving facts. Second, the cloud lowers the barrier to entry for smaller entities. Whether a practice owns a thousand wireless devices or two, the data can be accessed using the same interface.
Big Data in Healthcare
Equally exciting to the healthcare industry is the possibility of big data being used to improve patient care outcomes. Regulatory agencies are increasingly asking institutions to utilize the power of big data to reconcile patient medication history. This reconciliation stands to reduce dangerous medication interactions as well as identify issues in effectiveness. Raw data by the terabyte, through robust technology and wise analytics, can identify trends that would otherwise be invisible or at least hard to track. The bigger the data the better. Consider the possible public health ramifications of hospitals being able to identify in real time the occurrence of patients with a highly contagious illness walking through their doors? Previously undiscovered negative drug interactions could be identified almost immediately if big data is properly mined and managed.
A Meaningful Combination
Perhaps the greatest hurdle for healthcare IT to overcome is the creation of a meaningful way to combine cloud storage and access with big data in a way that is intuitive and useful. Ease of use assures that data is easy to input and share for every person on the chain of health information, regardless of tech skill, an issue faced by doctors and practitioners being asked to adopt and implement new technologies and best practices without training. For decades they have been trained to hand a slip of paper to a patient needing lab work, and even though a digital request is faster and more secure, the movement toward digitization in the healthcare industry has been slow. In order for the transformation to be successful, the industry has need not just for technology but for technology that is easy to use, unquestionably secure, and affordable to implement. Because the core of healthcare is people driven, the core of healthcare IT must also be people driven.
Healthcare IT may be slow to change, but as big data and cloud computing continue to grow in ubiquity, the change will continue its inexorable march forward. Combining these two ideas will lead to fantastic increases in efficiency and improved patient outcomes so long as the technology developed is created with usability and ease of implementation in mind.
