Panel says health 2.0 approaches can lower administrative costs

This week, at San Francisco's Health 2.0 meeting, they're not just talking about how cool social media-based healthcare applications are. At least one panel is suggesting that health 2.0 technology and services can actually lower health administration costs, reports say.

Health 2.0 technologies--defined as user-generated or participatory healthcare incorporating search tools that create communities--actually cut down on administrative waste and redundancy by giving everyone involved in care more access to information, according to medical economist J.D. Klienke.

Health 2.0 can also help patients understand that sometimes less care is better care, and that you can shrink costs by lowering rates of needless procedures, suggested Maggie Mahar, health care fellow at the Century Foundation.  For example, such community-based information sharing might cut into the 20 to 30 percent of elective surgeries that weren't truly needed, she suggests.

Yet another benefit of health 2.0 approaches is that they can help enable shared decision-making between doctors and patients, which can ultimately improve, not only care quality and patient satisfaction, but also costs, Mahar said.

To learn more about the panel:
- read this Healthcare Finance News piece

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