More Thoughts

After a day or so of thinking about this subject, a few more ideas come to mind. The establishment and maintenance of a universal database of patients that compiles data could be an enormously beneficial resource to reduce the cost and improve the quality of health care. An improved and carefully maintained database decreases health by eliminating much of the paperwork needed that results from different policies in different places of the country and between doctors. Transferring between doctors or hospitals or from plan to plan would be much less complicated and doctors could easily pull up a patient’s history and eliminate the mistakes and misunderstandings that grow out of the use and categorization in different systems. Currently, patient’s records are fairly simple to use and pull up info such as previous vaccinations and surgeries but the next step is to compile the data into a very detailed list that could be standardized among doctors and medical clinics and hospitals around the country. Another similar way of reducing the cost of health care is to assemble data about diseases and illnesses. In particular, the important ones to focus on are very infectious and common diseases, such as the common cold or the flu. This database could be tied with the previous one I alluded to in this blog. Geographic plots of illnesses can help researchers, hospitals, and companies see what area of the country may need certain kinds of medical treatment, such as containing an outbreak of the swine flu. This would help reduce the cost of health care by allowing supplies of medical equipment and medicines to move as needed, particularly for seasonal and regional illnesses, such as colds in the winter. That's it for today; this is getting progressively harder, I hope I can come up with the full ten by Thursday.