Blegging for health care experts

As I’ve said before, health care is one of those public policy areas that I know is really, really important — and yet I cannot muster up any authentic interest in the issue whatsoever. So, I’m going to ask my readers to help me out and decipher the import of a recent Medicare initiative, as descibed by Gina Kolata in the New York Times:

There is no one in medicine who does not consider it both crucial and long overdue to have electronic records in doctor’s offices and hospitals…. Now, however, Medicare, which says the lack of electronic records is one of the biggest impediments to improving health care, has decided to step in. In an unprecedented move, it said it planned to announce that it would give doctors – free of charge – software to computerize their medical practices. An office with five doctors could save more than $100,000 by choosing the Medicare software rather than buying software from a private company, officials say. The program begins next month, and the software is a version of a well-proven electronic health record system, called Vista, that has been used for two decades by hospitals, doctors and clinics with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Medicare will also provide a list of companies that have been trained to install and maintain the system. Given Medicare’s heft, the software giveaway could transform American medicine, said Dr. John Wasson, a Dartmouth Medical School health care researcher. But, Dr. Wasson added, it may take a while. “If you look at it from a five-year point of view, it will make a huge difference,” he said…. The Vista project began a few years ago when Medicare officials realized that help for small medical practices was in its own backyard. The federal government had already paid hundreds of millions of dollars to develop Vista, and now uses it in the Veterans Administration’s 1,300 inpatient and outpatient facilities, which maintain more than 10 million records and treat more than five million veterans a year. Why not give Vista to doctors? In fact, though few knew, Vista had been available all along to anyone who submitted a Freedom of Information Act request. Over the years, the program had accrued a passionate following and even an organization, World Vista, founded in 2002 mostly by V.A. employees to help spread it throughout the world. One reason for their enthusiasm was that no company owns Vista so anyone can modify and enhance it. It is, said Joseph Dal Molin, director of World Vista, a survival of the fittest. “What’s good survives,” he said. One feature, for example, was suggested by a V.A. nurse. Why not put a bar code on a prescription bottle to identify the drug and its dose, put a bar code on the patient’s wristband to identify the patient’s prescription, and then scan the drug label and the patient’s wristband before administering a drug? If there was a discrepancy, Vista could catch it before an error was made. Programmers added that feature, and V.A. drug errors plummeted by 80 percent overnight.

Here’s a link to the World Vista homepage. I have every confidence that the mix of open source software and halth care policy will inspire someone to comment on the importance of this policy initiative. Anyone?