The
Digital Hospital
How info tech saves lives and money at one medical center. Is this the future of health care?
Peter
A. Gross has been a doctor for 40 years, rising up
the ranks to become the
chairman of internal medicine at Hackensack University
Medical Center in Hackensack,
N.J. But one day this winter, a homeless man checked
in to the hospital with HIV,
and Gross made a decision that could have seriously
harmed his patient. He chose
to give the patient an HIV drug, tapping a request
into a hospital computer and
zapping it off to the two-year-old digital drug-order
entry system. Moments later
he got back a message he never would have received
before the system was in place:
a warning that the drug could mix dangerously with
an antidepressant the patient
was already taking. Gross got on the phone to figure
out the problem, eventually
asking the man's psychiatrist to reduce the dosage
of his antidepressant. "There's
no way I would have picked that up," Gross says.
"It was totally unexpected."
AdvertisementScenes
like this are unfolding across the country, providing
a glimpse into
the potential of information technology to transform
the health-care industry.
Hackensack is one of the nation's most aggressive tech
adopters. Millions of dollars
in investments have paid for projects well beyond the
online drug system that
tipped off Gross. Doctors can tap an internal Web site
to examine X-rays from
a PC anywhere. Patients can use 37-inch plasma TVs
in their rooms to surf the
Net for information about their medical conditions.
There's even a life-size robot,
Mr. Rounder, that doctors can control from their laptops
at home. They direct
the digital doc, complete with white lab coat and stethoscope,
into hospital rooms
and use two-way video to discuss patients' conditions. Whimsical?
Maybe, but Hackensack's results are perfectly serious.
Patient mortality
rates are down. Quality of care is up. At the same
time, productivity is rising.
While these are early days and plenty of hurdles remain,
the hospital has no doubts
that its technology investments are making the difference.
"We could never
become a top hospital unless we were tops in tech,"
says John P. Ferguson,
the hospital's chief executive. Is
this the health-care industry's future? It would be
a startling reversal.
For years health care has missed out on the huge benefits
that information technology
has bestowed upon the rest of the economy. Hospitals
were not only cheapskates
when it came to investing in computers and Web technologies
but also had a knack
for wasting the money they did spend. During the 1990s,
productivity in health-care
services declined, according to estimates from Economy.com
Inc. That's a huge
underachievement in a decade of strong gains for the overall economy. All
of that may be beginning to change. Hospitals such
as Hackensack, along with
insurers and the government, are stepping up their
investments in technology.
For hospitals, there's more motivation than ever: The
government and private insurers
are beginning to pay hospitals more for higher-quality
care -- and the only way
to measure quality, and then improve it, is with more
information technology.
Hospital spending on such gear is expected to climb
to $30.5 billion next year,
from $25.8 billion in 2004, according to researcher Dorenfest Group.Dollars
are dandy. Even more important, though, hospitals finally
seem to be
figuring out how to make their tech investments pay
off. Clumsy, sluggish first-generation
systems have been tossed out. Hospitals are listening
to doctors and nurses and
installing laptops, software, and Net technologies
fine-tuned to the rhythms of
their work. The results are beginning to show up in
national statistics: Economy.com
figures that health-care services productivity has
risen about 2% annually since
2001, albeit at a slower pace than the overall economy.
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