Let’s recognize Healthcare.gov as the dawn of mass patient engagement – and applaud it. Before this website, patients were along for the ride. Employers choose most of the insurance benefits, hospital web portals are an afterthought, and getting anything done with an insurance company, for both doctors and patients, means a phone call and paper. Can you imagine going online to find out the actual cost and buy anything? All that changed with Healthcare.gov.
Information is valuable and not evenly distributed. The haves are immensely valuable corporations. The have nots are patients and doctors. Welcome to the world of health IT politics where the rich get richer ($20 Billion of “incentives” have caused massive health IT consolidation and a hidden health surveillance state) and the poor get frustrated (talk to an independent physician about their EHR or to a patient trying to access her own health records).
Information asymmetry drives $1 Trillion waste of our $2.7 Trillion health care cost. That waste is about $3,000 per year per citizen.
The politics of health IT policy are not left vs. right but institution vs. individual. Politicians and regulators alike are now scrambling to understand the role of health IT policy in that $3,000 annual waste per citizen.
The asymmetry that drives health IT policy is easy to understand when you consider that health IT is sold to corporations. As physicians and patients, we do not prescribe or buy information technology and we are paying the price through a total lack of price and quality transparency.
