Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients

From the New Yorker - Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients: "Besides looking at assault patterns, he began studying patterns in the way patients flowed into and out of Camden’s hospitals. “I’d just sit there and play with the data for hours,” he says, and the more he played the more he found. For instance, he ran the data on the locations where ambulances picked up patients with fall injuries, and discovered that a single building in central Camden sent more people to the hospital with serious falls—fifty-seven elderly in two years—than any other in the city, resulting in almost three million dollars in health-care bills. “It was just this amazing window into the health-care delivery system,” he says. Read more."

This is an incredibly interesting article... I think it is a good example of how we need BOTH more technology and more human connection. Brenner and the other doctors could only find information like this through extensive electronic records, but they only fix the problems through more one-on-one contact.

There does not need to be tension between embracing more and more technological innovation and "personalizing" medicine. More technology can mean higher or lower costs, depending on how it's deployed, and it can mean better or worse care, again depending on how it's used. And in addition to providing better care, more personal care doesn't have to mean higher costs - it can also keep costs lower in the long run.

Progress is about creatively answering "yes" to an either/or question.