Doctors Need Help Dealing with Personalized Medicine

Evidence-based medicine is all about giving healthcare professionals a more informed way to decide what care to provide a patient and how to provide it. The problem is getting the right evidence-based information to the docs, nurses, and other care providers in a timely fashion, and then giving then the time required to absorb it and take advantage of it. eWeek discusses this in an article they referenced in a recent Health Care Update. The article was actually published on the CIO Insight site about a year ago, so it's a bit of a mystery as to why it is being recycled at this particular moment, but I didn't see it then and it's still timely, so I'm happy they brought it to my attention. It'scalled Doctors Need Help Dealing with Personalized Medicine. Here's a taste.

It's an open secret that half of people taking certain long-term, high-cost drugs won't benefit from them. As patients are being asked to shoulder more of the costs, and decisions, for their health care, they face tougher choices about whether the dollars for their daily doses are well spent. Researchers are starting to figure out which treatments work for which people, but those answers will come as statistics, not certainties. They promise to cut expensive, unnecessary care, and prevent more-expensive, more-harmful medical injuries. They will do neither, however, unless doctors are given more training, support tools and time with patients.

Amen. But IT can help. Prompt and reminder systems such as Cielo Clinic can be a major part of the solution, as I wrote back in April in a post entitled The Killer App of 21st Century Healthcare. Cielo Clinic doesn't give the doctors and nurses more time, but it does create a set of pithy reminders about chronic and/or ongoing issues in the patient's medical history just as the caregiver is about to walk in the door of the exam room.

"Less is more" is paradoxical but necessary in the age of information overload. The near future of the US healthcare system does not hold much promise for caregivers getting more time to absorb information, so it is critical that we provide the needed information, and ONLY the needed information, at exactly the right moment, so the important facts as in the doctor or nurse's short-term memory as the exam room door begins to open. That may not be the best solution, but it's likely to be the best we can do for the time being.