A new website from the Michigan Health and Hospital Association now provides Michigan residents with information on costs, payment options, and quality of care at Michigan’s 146 nonprofit community hospitals. According to this write-up in the Great Lakes IT Report, the site provides specific information on the average charge, average payment, average length of stay for inpatient procedures, and total number of patients who were treated for each of the medical procedures at Michigan hospitals.
This is the latest example of a new movement toward consumer-driven health care that has the potential to empower all of us in some of the most important decisions in our lives while simultaneously transforming an increasingly broken system. Furthermore, this is a classic example of public bodies and private enterprise working in tandem to tackle one of our most pressing challenges.
Here in Michigan, we have our Michigan Health Information Technology Commission, a group appointed by Governor Granholm in August 2006 “to facilitate and promote the design, implementation, operation, and maintenance of an interoperable health care information infrastructure in Michigan.” The commission’s work is backed up by more than $4.5 million in funding to help make Michigan the first state in the nation with a program of this magnitude to streamline medical information, and cements Michigan’s move toward becoming the nation’s leader in the health IT field. In addition, the state also created the Michigan Health Information Network last year to convene Michigan’s health care stakeholders to speed the adoption of health information technology and promote health information exchange. For these efforts, Michigan was recognized as a national leader at an awards ceremony this past June, winning the 2007 Statewide Leadership Advocacy Award from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
In addition, private companies are also weighing into this field. Steve Case, the founder of AOL, has a new venture called Revolution Health which, according to Case’s blog, was designed to tackle some of the problems inherent in our way of delivering health care in this country. Case writes: “Even though the United States has many of the world’s best doctors, hospitals, and technologies, the “system” continues to make things difficult, cumbersome and frustrating. … The system doesn’t need incremental bandaid type approaches. It needs fresh thinking. It needs a revolution, led by the people, for the people.” This “people powered” approach is at the heart of Case’s approach, and Revolution Health’s mission is to provide information to consumers that allows them to make more informed health care decisions, from insurance options to finding the best place for treatment. As Case asks: “Isn’t it crazy that we have ratings to help us pick movies, restaurants and hotels - but no comparable tools to help evaluate doctors, hospitals and treatments?”
That is exactly the problem that Revolution Health in the private sector, the Michigan Health Information Technology Commission and Michigan Health Information Network in the public sector and the Michigan Health and Hospital Association in the nonprofit sector are trying to answer, and the fact that all involved are working on the problem suggests we may be that much closer to a solution.
The bottom line is that health care is broken in this country, and there are no easy answers for how to fix it. The three challenges, roughly, are cost of health care; access to health care; and quality of health care. Trying to address one often has knock-on effects on the other two, and so we sit with the most expensive health care in the world that still doesn’t cover 40 million Americans. Using information technology to address some of these issues certainly doesn’t overcome all the challenges involved, but it’s a start. More important, it has the promise of putting people back at the center of the health care decision-making process, something that has not been true for far too long. Only by empowering individuals to take charge of their own health care can we hope to change – and fix – a broken system. That’s why it’s so promising that Michigan is at cutting edge on this issue, and that the challenges are being addressed not by government alone, but by government, the private sector and the nonprofit sector. Perhaps we’re finally on the right track to a better approach to health care – one that puts people first.