New technology can save lives, argues Newt Gingrich, former US Congressman. Joe Humphreys reports
Hundreds of people are being killed in Ireland each year through medical errors that could be eliminated through a small investment in technology, former US congressman Newt Gingrich has claimed.
The ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives, who is in Dublin tomorrow to open a three-day conference on Transforming Healthcare in the New Europe, said both lives and money could be saved in the sector if healthcare professionals more willingly embraced new technology.
"We recommend starting with a Web-based system," he told The Irish Times. "Currently, all records follow the clinic or hospital, not the individual. By setting up an individual health record on the Web you could ensure that wherever your doctor comes from they can check that any prescription needed is appropriate for the patient."
Such a system, costing an estimated $10 (€8.20) per person to set up, and $3 per person a year to sustain, would dramatically reduce the number of medical errors caused by doctors incorrectly prescribing drugs, he says.
"In the US, we kill about 90,000 people a year due to medical errors. In Ireland, I guess it's maybe 250-300 people a year. We would not accept that with car crashes or aeroplane crashes. We shouldn't accept it with healthcare.
"There are three rights of patient: a right not to be killed unnecessarily; a right to own your own health record; and a right to know the quality and cost of the system you are going into. At the moment, you don't have any of those rights.
"In the US, the Institute of Medicine estimates that it takes up to 17 years for a new best outcome to reach every doctor. That is an extraordinary statistic because the odds are very high that if we found a way to cure cancer, your doctor will not know it."
Gingrich has made healthcare reform a personal crusade since he retired from Congress after 26 years' service. The chief executive of an Atlanta-based consultancy firm, the Gingrich Group, he recently founded the Centre for Health Transformation, a collaboration of public and private entities in the sector, and sits on several advisory boards on medical research.
A widely published author on healthcare reform, Gingrich is also a member of the board of the US Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
While his fans describe him as a visionary, his critics regard him as an unreconstructed right-winger who places an unrealistic faith in technology to sort out healthcare's problems. Reducing bureaucracy and government interference in the market are Gingrich's catch-cries. He regards the current US healthcare system as overly paper-based and "socialistic".
Sometimes he drifts into management-speak (e.g. "Reforms without vision are simply activities"). Other times he is vague on detail: inequalities in the health sector can be overcome by "making use of tax credits and vouchers to have everyone insured".
But few would disagree with the bottom line of his argument: the current system needs reform. A cornerstone of his thinking is that patients themselves are an untapped resource in the healthcare system. By giving them more control over their own care, they can introduce a competitive dynamic that increases efficiency.
He also believes it should be harder for people to sue pharmaceutical companies, which he says are unfairly penalised for developing new drugs.
Moreover, if medical research was allowed to blossom, eliminating Alzheimer's disease would be "a plausible goal" for the next quarter century.
The present "bureaucratic, adversarial, unionised, labour-intensive, litigious, regulatory, one-size-fits-all, penalties-and-punishment-oriented system that criminalises everyday activities... punishes the risk-taking and innovative while rewarding the mediocre and the energyless.
"Why would we think large, centralised paper-ridden bureaucracies work in America any better than they worked in Moscow?" he once asked.
Gingrich - who claims his grandmother had roots in Co Donegal - says the central message at the Dublin conference, which will include health officials from the EU accession states, "is that we are in the early stages of a health transformation that will bring better health outcomes at lower costs in a way that will be very different from the system at present.
"First, there is a shift from paper to information technology. Second, there is a move from acute care to preventative care, and third, there is a change in focus from bureaucracy to the individual. In future, you will have knowledge of how to take care of yourself, and the ability to take care of yourself."