Center for American Progress’ Health IT Report
Navigating American Health Care
How IT Can Foster Health Care Improvement
By Karen Davenport
May 29, 2007
“Here there be monsters,” warned ancient mariners’ maps of the uncharted corners of the seas and the creatures that lurked within. The oceans of paper and mountains of file cabinets required to track patients in the U.S. health care system today is akin in many ways to the murky depths, reams of maps and collections of chronometers and sextants which not long ago guided the global maritime industry. Since ancient times—Homer tells us that Odysseus relied on the Pleiades star cluster and the Herdsman and Bear constellations to steer him from Calypso’s cave towards Ithaca—navigators have depended upon celestial navigation, enhanced by technology and coastal charts, to determine position and plan the movement of their vessels.More recently, electronic navigation techniques such as radio navigation and radar, have enabled ship’s officers to obtain the information they need to safely travel the seas. In the last twenty years however, the development of satellite navigation through the Global Positioning System largely displaced radio and radar. Today, GPS provides the fastest, most accurate method for mariners to navigate, measure speed, and determine location, and is used by merchant vessels, fishing fleets, and naval operations.
GPS enables real-time, completely automated understanding of vessel location and provides vital information for vessel traffic control in busy seaways. In addition, Global Information Systems technology provides critical tools for the management and operation of port facilities, facilitating the automation of container shipment movements. The information technology applications and systems enabled by GIS and GPS have changed how the world’s maritime industry performs its basic (though still exceedingly complex) functions.
Similarly, IT applications and systems could help our nation’s health care system, in which fewer than half of patients receive the right care at the right time, navigate the complex waters of coordinating care, reporting quality outcomes, understanding which drugs, devices and treatment plans offer the best course of care, and re-engineer the health care delivery process to improve quality.
Mapping clinical and payment data to health care outcomes could be as revolutionary for the U.S. health care system as GSP and GIS were for the maritime industry. Health IT systems, properly implemented, could transform how health care providers deliver care—resulting in a quality-focused health care system that improves lives, lower costs, and boosts health care productivity.
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