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Panel says health 2.0 approaches can lower administrative costs

October 7, 2009 — 11:16am ET | By Anne Zieger
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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

Related Articles:
FDA could regulate aspects of health IT, health 2.0
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By Anne Carroll | Posted 2:31pm | October 7, 2009

All of this is just speculation, and it should have been reported as such. Note this conference was produced by the vendors; not exactly a reliable source for weighing pros vs. cons, or admitting that there isn't enough data or experience with this application yet to know whether their predictions are even in the ballpark.

This application is still only an individual transaction between the patient and the doctor, and the validity and reliability of the information gleaned from its application is only as good as the users on either end. The doctor still has to monitor whether the patient's behavior changes in order to "measure" behavioral change. If this isn't done in real time encounters, for various reasons, why should anyone assume that it will be improved through the application of this technology.

A more efficient and effective way of improving medical care on behalf of patients is still through shared data between and among patients and their various providers to support seamless integrated and safer care. These "social media" vendors should be challenged to head-to-head evaluations of this technology vs. EMR's (no, I'm not an EMR vendor or investor--just a HIT enthusiast).

P.S. Isn't the term "privacy transparency" an oxymoron? Did anyone stop the speaker long enough to ask him what he actually meant by it?

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