Blog Assignment #4 - Improving Healthcare

Imagine walking into a gigantic safe filled with currency that totaled seven hundred billion dollars. You look around in amazement because you have never seen this much money in your life. Next they bring in a shredder and a dumpster, and they tell you that they want you to dispose of every single dollar. As you watch each dollar shredded and thrown away you are getting a dose of what the medical system experiences every year. Seven hundred billion dollars is an estimate of how much money is wasted each year in the medical system. Due to unnecessary treatments, redundant tests, fraud, errors, and a slew of other things large sums of money are wasted each year. How can this be fixed? What systems need to be implemented or modified in order ensure money is not being wasted because of he medical system? IT and Knowledge management can directly affect and change things around in the medical system.

One of the biggest reasons that money is wasted in the medical system is fraud. An easy fix for this is to strengthen the security on insurance information as well as have a more detailed process for checking into medical institutions. Nobody wants to fill out papers all day which is where IT comes into place. Medical institutions can incorporate a new system in where you fill out generic information such as patients name and insurance carriers online prior to your visit. This will shorten the wait time for patients as well as give the medical institutions a chance to review the patient and their insurance information prior to visits to avoid fraud. Knowledge Management also comes into play. Not having properly trained staff members have lead to unnecessary treatments, and if someone is treated with the wrong treatment you have to go back and correct that which is a waste of money, also in some cases there are redundant test. This can be easily fixed with more extensive training and hands on practice. This way IT and Knowledge management can be incorporated together to solve this problem. Medical Institutions can implement an online simulator that puts their staff in real life situations in which they have to think on their feet. 700 billion dollars is a lot of debt so these small changes won’t make up for all of that but its surely a start.