Ehealth to minimise healthcare waste

It’s estimated that every year $2.5 trillion is lost around the world due to inefficient healthcare practices. That’s right, trillions of dollars. The figure comes from global research conducted by IBM as part of its Smarter Planet initiative.

Judy Anderson, IBM’s manager of government relations sat down with eHealthSpace.org to discuss where this waste is happening and how ehealth services can help.

“Our research into wastage found that $2.5 trillion was essentially being wasted around the globe in the healthcare sector because of inefficient practices,” Ms Anderson said. “There’s the opportunity to have gains in the area of 35 percent simply by applying ehealth techniques and practices.”

Closer to home, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) also looked into waste in the healthcare system. Its findings were sobering. According to the AIHW, 50 percent of patients with a heart condition don’t use the correct medication, or any medication at all. Every year 2 million Australians experience an adverse drug reaction, and close to 60 per cent of all hospital admissions are unnecessary. The list goes on.

The key question is, what can we do about it? Australia already has a number ehealth initiatives underway. The federal government allocated every person and provider a 16-digit number in July of this year, and there’s a further $467 million marked out to begin the process of creating personal electronic healthcare records by 2010.

“The problem we have in Australia is that, according to the National Health and Hospital Reforms Commission, we have a fragmented healthcare system that is ill-equipped to face the challenges that it is facing today,” Ms Anderson said. “The reality is that if we don’t have an effective healthcare system, then it is a significant drag on the economy.”

The way to fix the healthcare system, according to Ms Anderson and IBM, is to engage in microeconomic reform across the sector, a path other industries have taken. To undertake that sort of reform, we need to focus on building a patient-centric healthcare system so that people have more control over managing their own health.

“We also need greater innovation, and incentives to come up with better service delivery models,” she said.

Finally, we need greater transparency into costs, so that patients understand as they move through the healthcare system what their treatments cost. The Australian government also needs a better idea of what the healthcare system costs.

“Ehealth is the enabler to drive better healthcare outcomes,” Ms Anderson said. “Health is fundamentally a knowledge industry, and so it makes sense that it has a strong information infrastructure underpinning it.”