Perednia: "Starting Over With Healthcare Reform Is, Unfortunately, a Matter of Religion"

Over at "The Road to Hellth" blog, Douglas Perednia MD has written an excellent piece entitled "Starting Over With Healthcare Reform Is, Unfortunately, a Matter of Religion."

The use of the term "religion" is not literal but figurative:

... In deciding what to do [in recent years], political leaders stopped dealing in experience, evidence and compromise, and began dealing in faith-based – almost religious – healthcare decision-making. Of course in this context we’re not talking about “faith-based” in its meaning of handed down from the one true God (or the many true Gods, depending upon your religion), but instead faith-based in the sense of having fixed and immutable beliefs about things like how to run healthcare or, indeed, the whole country.  It doesn’t matter what the available evidence shows or what human experience has been, the political religions of the left and right, Republicans and Democrats, won’t tolerate alternative facts, strategies or explanations.  Doing so would be sacrilege, remediable only by human sacrifice. 

The point of his post is that in the U.S. both political parties have abandoned all pretense of listening to science or reason and making compromises that benefit patients.  They are making all decisions on fervently-held, unshakeable ideological beliefs (and, I add in some cases, for personal gain no matter the consequences to the public).

I am reproducing the section of his essay on health IT, that illustrates his point well:

A third example is the sacrificial cult of electronic medical records.  [Sadly, that phraseology is all too apt - ed.]  Except for those who work at Departments of Medical Informatics or as physician “champions” for EMR vendors or health systems that are spending billions to implement the darned things, the vast majority of doctors and nurses will tell you that EMRs are a chainsaw to clinical productivity and the amount of time that we actually spend listening to and getting to know our patients and their problems.  Non-vendor, non-government studies that show that these systems save money or actually improve clinical results are scarcer than hen’s teeth, yet not a day goes by without having shamans in the Cult of EMR claim that we will see miraculous increases in efficiency, reductions in cost, improvements in health and a blooming of preventive medicine “any day now”.  

These claims are increasing in intensity and shamelessness.  This is at a time when it is admitted by some of the most respected scientific bodies (e.g., National Research Council, FDA, IOM, NIST) that the technology does not support clinicians' cognitive needs, is in fact disruptive and hard to use, and reports of harm are appearing.  Worse, they report - magnitudes of reported harm are unknown due to impaired information diffusion.  The impairment is both due to lack of regulation and regulatory authorities to report to (which allows opportunism), as well as due to business IT-modeled legal contracts with IP-protection and defects gag clauses.

The cult has grown so powerful that has been able to force clinics and hospitals to sacrifice themselves in the process; goaded by the awards and penalties handed out for the presence or absence of “meaningful use”.  It’s no great revelation that is a new technology is truly useful, beneficial and cost-effective, there is absolutely no reason that a government would need to mandate its use or bribe people to buy it.  Dr. Scot Silverstein at the Health Care Renewal blog has devoted his career to documenting the questionable engineering and lack of clinical awareness that goes into these systems, but you will not identify single iota of doubt in the pronouncements of the Office of the National Coordinator or the politicians who are receiving funds and advice from the “healthcare information technology” (HIT) industry.  Their minds are made up.  Don’t confuse them with the facts.

I wouldn't say I've "devoted my career" to documenting the problems only.  I've been spending considerable time now doing something about it.  This includes, in part, advising attorneys on both sides of the Bar on the problems they need to be aware of.

This knowledge will likely benefit plaintiff's lawyers and injured patients far more than the defense.  There is no defense for cybernetically harming people with poorly designed and implemented, experimental medical devices, used without patient informed consent, or for trying to conceal the malpractice via electronic legerdemain.

It is my belief that a fair share of cavalier health IT experimenters, dyscompetents and "creative medical history editors" responsible for the current shabby state (technically and ethically) of commercial HIT, a situation that could have been avoided via learning from the medical and technological past, will have a very unpleasant and costly time in the courtroom in future years. 

-- SS