November 2011

As health care moves into a transformational era of efficiency, effectiveness and improved patient outcomes through health information technology (health IT), Booz Allen Hamilton has examined the broad impact of this trend and identified the top nine ways health IT is transforming health care.

1. Reduces medical errors. Health IT helps to identify potential mistakes, such as flagging possible interactions between prescribed medications that may cause serious complications.
2. Improves collaboration throughout the health care system. Unlike paper records, digitized health information can move, integrate and paint a real-time picture of the whole person, creating increased knowledge, dialogue and collaboration among the patient and his or her physicians, specialists, nurses and technicians. This leads to improved patient-centered understanding and coordinated action. It can also enhance preventative care, by automating a reminder system for certain tests like mammograms.
3. Ensures better patient-care transition. As patients move from the hospital to outpatient settings—going home, to assisted living facilities, or to long-term care facilities—health IT facilitates a seamless transition from one stage of care to the next and ensures that patients get the treatment and medicine they need without delays or mix-ups.
4. Enables faster, better emergency care. When seconds can make the difference, today’s technology allows results from tests conducted by first responders to be sent wirelessly to doctors in the emergency departments, allowing physicians to be ready and waiting with a plan of action when the patient arrives. Health IT also can facilitate access to an incoming patient’s health information—even if the patient is incapacitated—alerting providers of any existing conditions, allergies and prescriptions.
5. Empowers patients and their families to participate in care decisions. Health IT provides patients more access to their medical information and information about their health care options, which empowers them to become informed and educated advocates for their own care. At the same time, as patients have more access to their medical information and use health IT to make decisions, their families—who play a critical role in their care — can play a more active, personal role. In addition, health IT allows for care customized to each patient’s unique situation, whether that means allowing families access to information to help in decision-making, or ensuring information is culturally appropriate.
6. Makes care more convenient for patients. Health IT enables online appointment scheduling, online wait time displays for emergency departments, and the convenience of e-mailing your doctor. Also with health IT, a patient’s medical history, prescription information and test results are at their care provider’s fingertips, saving the patient the burden of providing the information repeatedly to different doctors. In addition, telemedicine, remote monitoring and mobile technology give health care professionals the ability to treat patients at home, saving travel and wait times.
7. Helps care for the warfighter. When military medics have immediate access to medical records, they can forward critical information on wounded warriors to field hospitals. That information follows the soldiers as they journey from the front line back to rehabilitation in the states.
8. Enhances ability to respond to public health emergencies and disasters. Data can be aggregated and used to improve public health, helping to understand outbreaks in communities and allowing appropriate responses. In disaster situations such as a hurricane, health IT can give practitioners access to a patient’s medical history, regardless of where their medical information lives. When Joplin, Missouri, was hit with a catastrophic tornado earlier this year, the paper records for a local hospital were scattered throughout the region, but the electronic medical records were intact, allowing treatment to continue at alternate facilities.
9. Enables discovery in new medical breakthroughs and provides a platform for innovation. As patient information becomes digitized, researchers can now analyze large sets of anonymous data, facilitating the rapid introduction of new therapies and better analysis on the effectiveness of medications and treatments. In addition, through the increased use of new, innovative mobile technologies and social networking tools, health IT offers the health care industry new ways to understand and administer care to patients.

[Commentary] Presidential debates, says NBC News Political Director and Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd, are now part of the winnowing process. Instead of going to a small state and wooing caucus-goers, Republican presidential hopefuls are going on national cable to see if they can resonate with the voters.

With 26 GOP debates currently scheduled between May 5, 2011, and March 19, 2012 (17 of them before the Iowa caucuses), the fight for the party’s nomination is now played out in living rooms and dens around the country as much as in diners, candidate coffees and small events in Iowa and New Hampshire. On television, this year’s debates have drawn more than the handful of political junkies and campaign professionals who once tuned in. They have become big events. The question is whether the steady stream of debates that we have already seen really helps us understand and compare the candidates — or whether a series of one-on-one, in-depth interviews with a thoughtful questioner, such as Charlie Rose or Jim Lehrer, might teach us more about the candidates than a dozen cattle calls.

[Rothenberg is editor of the Rothenberg Political Report]

Large and diverse sets of data have become abundant as more information is posted on the Internet, from stock prices and news pages to sensor readings. Now the cost of analyzing and visualizing that data is dropping fast, too, with implications for all kinds of decision-making.

A company called Recorded Future looks at 100,000 Web pages an hour, scanning across 50,000 sources that include everything from Securities and Exchange Commission filings to Twitter comments. The idea is to look for statements about the future, like notice of an annual meeting or predictions about when a product might be released, look at past developments and then create a “temporal index” that suggests trends. “The Web has come to reflect the world,” says Christopher Ahlberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Recorded Future. “We can use that to predict things.” Recorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google’s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks. Its products include a $9,000-a-month service for hedge funds that plugs Recorded Future’s insights into their trading networks. There are both direct and indirect insights. Expected news, like a meeting or filing, can create volatility in stock prices. Recorded Future predicts five days ahead of time.

AT&T denied all claims in antitrust lawsuits by Sprint Nextel and Cellular South over its proposed purchase of T-Mobile USA. AT&T, in separate filings in federal court in Washington, rejected Sprint and Cellular South’s allegations that the $39 billion transaction would harm the companies’ ability to compete in the wireless mobile phone market. “The expansion of capacity and other overwhelming efficiencies that will result from this transaction will benefit consumers, such that the transaction is in the public interest,” AT&T said.