IOM calls for better use of technology in healthcare

(Updated with comment from committee members at 2:10 p.m. ET.)

Recent advances in science and technology hold the keys to addressing an increasingly complicated healthcare system plagued by inefficiency, high costs and poor quality, the Institute of Medicine said in a report released Thursday.

In the 382-page report, Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America, an 18-member expert panel argues for a set of improvement strategies that panel members say will make information more accessible, engage patients and their families and make care more equitable. Those changes, which the committee referred to as a road map, include increased adoption of health information technology, increased connectivity, use of new payment models and a re-engineering of healthcare systems.

“Missed opportunities for better healthcare have real human and economic impacts,” the committee said in the report. “If the care in every state were of the quality delivered by the highest-performing state, an estimated 75,000 fewer deaths would have occurred across the country in 2005. Current waste diverts resources from productive use, resulting in an estimated $750 billion loss in 2009.”

The report comes more than a decade after the release of To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, companion reports that sounded the alarm about preventable harm and poor performance. But poorly designed systems, lack of information at the point of care and anentrenched culture have hindered large-scale improvement, the committee said.

“Available knowledge is too rarely applied to improve the care experience, and information generated by the care experience is too rarely gathered to improve the knowledge available,” the report said. “The traditional systems for transmitting new knowledge—the ways clinicians are educated, deployed, rewarded, and updated—can no longer keep pace with scientific advances. If unaddressed, the current shortfalls in the performance of the nation's healthcare system will deepen on both quality and cost dimensions, challenging the well-being of Americans now and potentially far into the future.”

Several members of the committee offered their views during an event marking the report's release. All of the necessary “pieces of the puzzle” for for healthcare transformation are there, said Dr. Craig Jones, director of the Vermont Blueprint for Health, a Burlington-based initiative that targets chronic disease. He said the the healthcare system needs to master how to put all of the components together.

Dr. Mark Smith, president and CEO of the California Healthcare Foundation and chair of the committee, said the message of the report was “fundamentally optimistic” because the changes it advocates for are happening in many places already. “That is profoundly encouraging,” he said.