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Tearing the healthcare system down to it's nuts and bolts would costs a lot more than to continue reforming. I spent some time consulting hospitals an implement
by dglassan 15y ago
Tearing the healthcare system down to it's nuts and bolts would costs a lot more than to continue reforming. I spent some time consulting hospitals an implementing electronic medical record systems for hospitals. It costs a hospital millions of dollars and thousands of hours to install and train people for these systems. Too many hospitals are too deep in these EMR systems to start from scratch again. Their margins are only around 1-2 percent as it is.
I agree, the healthcare system is a complete mess, but think of it like re-writing software. Sometimes continuously refactoring code is a much wiser decision than completely re-writing the code
- MartinCron 15y agoBy "sometimes" you mean, "nearly all the damn time". As an incrementalist coder, it frustrates me to see how non-incremental the approach to solving social problems often is. Decouple, solve one thing at a time, etc.
- yxhuvud 15y agoAlso: refactoring is good.
- ericd 15y agoA hospital's margins are only 1-2%? Do you have a source for that? Maybe they can pull that off by paying themselves all the profits, but there's no way that I buy that hospitals have thinner margins than grocery stores before that. Hospital administrators are very well off on average. Their fees are way too large to be running so close to the wire, given their expenses.
- seehafer 15y agoDo you have a source for the expenses that the average hospital incurs?
- shirederby 15y agoI was curious about this, so I searched around a bit. This is the most recent I found -- a median of 3.1 percent: http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/08/19/us-hospitals-usa-idUSTRE57I0IS20090819 http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/08/19/us-hospitals-usa-i...
- ericd 15y agoInteresting. I wonder how much of their operating expense is due to administrator salaries. A breakdown of expenses throughout hospitals and the health system would be really fascinating to see, and could probably shed light on potential solutions.