More digitization of health care key to improving service and reducing cost
MONTREAL – It’s unclear if Darren Entwistle meant to quote the iconic line from The Six Million Dollar Man, but its message was similar in tone, pushing for a plausible future in which technology plays more of a role in changing the human body – as well as its treatment, when sick or injured.
Entwistle pushed the efforts of Telus Health in finding technological solutions to make the delivery of health care more efficient, calling health care efficiency and effectiveness “the number one social challenge of our lifetimes,” in a speech to the Canadian Club in Montreal on Tuesday.
His speech was filled with statistics: How about half of provincial budgets going to health care spending; about how many hospital admissions and deaths are due to preventable errors; about the 30% of prescriptions that are never filled, about the $1.5 billion in “patient-centric information technology innovations” Telus has invested in, the more than 1,700 “health innovators” it has hired, and the 16,000 physicians he said are relying on electronic medical records whose technology Telus has owned (thanks mainly to its acquisitions of MD Practice Software LP, Wolf Medical Systems and KinLogix in the past decade).
Entwistle was short on specifics of what Telus is proposing, or what stumbling blocks he’d like removed, but he had plenty of imagery: “How is it I can access all of my banking services, hail a cab or FaceTime … with my cellphone, yet half of my doctor’s office is taken up by paper files?”
He described HD video conferencing allowing people in remote communities to be checked by doctors in big cities, of people letting their mobile devices record biometric information that’s shared with their physicians, about mobile health care labs whose main tool is a smartphone, and about electronic prescriptions, which is an area where Canada is lagging behind other G7 countries.
But he got fantastical and tugged at the heartstrings, too, when imagining a seven-month-old child with a painful, terminal illness, and a 67-year-old woman battling late-stage colon cancer, both being saved by genomics researchers who find a life-saving treatment or cure by studying their biometric data and the genetic makeup of their diseases.
(Correction) Or at least that’s what I thought. As a Telus media relations representative explained later, these are true stories, of a child whose disease was stopped (but not reversed) and a B.C. woman whose terminal colorectal cancer became barely detectable after two months.
“We are at the dawn of a new era where the molecular understanding of you as an individual is becoming a reality,” he said.
And who can be against saving the lives of seven-month-old babies?
