TRANSCRIPT
Hospitals have to work in a far more coherent, integrated fashion. Not just within the hospital — which is already a challenge, because it’s so fragmented among different departments, and imaging, and testing, and a patient moves from place to place. In the past, and even to some extent now, their information gets lost as they get moved around, even within the same building.
And so there’s unnecessary work done, there’s waste, there’s inefficiency, there are errors made. All of that has to change. But even more so, the patient comes from somewhere and leaves to somewhere, so unless the hospital is interconnected with that patient’s caregivers, both before and after their time in the hospital, they’re not going to have a good chance of that patient recovering well, maintaining their own health, and not returning to the hospital and the emergency room.
So the whole idea of coordinated care, or integrated care, aided by information technology is one that’s very much at the forefront, and is revolutionizing how healthcare delivery is going to happen now and in the future.
ABOUT THE RESEARCHER
Linda Green
Linda Green is the Cain Brothers and Company Professor Emerita of Healthcare Management at Columbia Business School. She is also the Faculty Director of...
