At the Health 2.0 Washington DC Conference Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the US Government, gave a keynote address on incorporating new capabilities into the nation’s healthcare system. One of the topics that he spoke to was the culture gap between consumers and government.
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“One of the topics that he spoke to was the culture gap between consumers and government.”
Well. The biggest culture gap I see is that analysts see this as being between “consumer” and “government.” It is not.
It is a misunderstanding between one group of people and another who, because of their own inability to analyze, instead break this into “consumers versus guv’mnt.”
When I put myself under the care of a doctor, I am not a damned consumer. I am a patient. The doctor is a doctor. I am to be cared for. The doctor is to care for me.
None of us is a provider of care, or a consumer of it. We’re people. Caring requires two people, not a provider/consumer economic dyad.
That’s the culture gap. We’re not scared of change. We’re scared that our “leaders” – those in charge, for instance, of my own hospital – don’t understand change at all because they’re focusing on moving things around, not in actually caring for people.
I’m in IT. I’ve been an agent of change all my adult life since 1982. I’ve made a study of change, because I realized long ago that things – machines – don’t cause change. They facilitate it.
People make change.
There is no culture gap in that. People in the government are missing the point. People in the public arena are missing the point to – government is people too.
Let’s talk realistically about a caring society first. Everything else will follow if our leaders will lead. They will. Because it will work.
And if you don’t believe that, world, I ask when you last tried it. You’ve tried everything else but caring.
Patients need better care, better nurses, attentive doctors, clean hospitals, better food, individualized care, etc. Chopra must be smokin something together with the Congress to think that care will not get worse as a result of the untested and proven devices they are promoting. Best strategy for the doctors is to not waste money on these devices and take the medicare cut…you will be ahead and your patients will thank you.
I think there’s a growing consensus that payment reform would have been a better starting point before the significant investment in EMR systems.
Culture gap? The greatest culture gap is between the government and the doctors. The patients are the pawns of the government. If the government listened to the clinicians, we would not be in this mess. Decades of failed policies, and now the leaders and Chopra are seduced by the dreams of HIT. These dreams failed in the UK. The USA is wasting $ billions on meaningfully useless HIT.