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Part of my wife's job is to research Medicaid billing codes for every state (yes, this is a state thing, but I'm just making an example). Once in a while she ca

Part of my wife's job is to research Medicaid billing codes for every state (yes, this is a state thing, but I'm just making an example). Once in a while she can get their codes in a form as "advanced" as an excel spreadsheet. But more likely she'll get a PDF doc that she's got to run through an OCR programming to convert it to a spreadsheet, and has to check for errors. Or for some states, nothing is published at all - she's got to piece it together from partner hospital billing records. There's no doubt that getting this data into a sane format will take the states some extra resources. But when you consider how much more efficient this will make my wife's company, and every other provider of Medicaid services, it's bound to be a huge win on net. And improving efficiency of delivering healthcare should be important. The government is big, but the private sector is still much larger. So there's great leverage to make our overall systems more efficient because an investment in efficiency on the government side will be multiplied many times over as seen by the many private entities that the government is overseeing.

mywittyname 8y ago
There's money to be made selling these information to hospitals. It's just really hard to sell things to hospitals.
- drak0n1c 8y ago
  Hospitals routinely spend huge sums of money on new equipment that significantly improves their competitive edge on diagnoses and outcomes. They are also willing to spend money on drop-in solutions that lessen the need for paperwork that eats up admin, nurse, or doctor time. However, you're right that they are notoriously stingy on buying new things if the economics aren't immediately apparent, and will never buy into something that demands radical workflow/org changes.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    By hard to sell to, I mean, it's hard to get in front of the right person. The people who control the purse strings are not necessarily the most knowledgeable about the problems at-hand either.
danmaz74 8y ago
That would make sense... If this provision included additional funding for the additional burden of providing this service.
wolco 8y ago
Would this put your wife out of work or force her to change positions internally?

mywittyname 8y ago

There's money to be made selling these information to hospitals. It's just really hard to sell things to hospitals.

drak0n1c 8y ago
Hospitals routinely spend huge sums of money on new equipment that significantly improves their competitive edge on diagnoses and outcomes. They are also willing to spend money on drop-in solutions that lessen the need for paperwork that eats up admin, nurse, or doctor time. However, you're right that they are notoriously stingy on buying new things if the economics aren't immediately apparent, and will never buy into something that demands radical workflow/org changes.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  By hard to sell to, I mean, it's hard to get in front of the right person. The people who control the purse strings are not necessarily the most knowledgeable about the problems at-hand either.

danmaz74 8y ago

That would make sense... If this provision included additional funding for the additional burden of providing this service.

wolco 8y ago

Would this put your wife out of work or force her to change positions internally?