Spending for health care

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

No, those are people who crunch numbers. Not end users. Look behind the people who push the research on electronic medial record keeping and you will find the companies who benifit from it paying for the research.

The Harvard guy is an end-user:

Dr. John Halamka is the chief information officer at Harvard Medical School and one of its teaching hospitals. He oversees 20,000 computers dedicated to health care.

"It requires a lot of hands on, this means you need training and education much more than hardware and software, and that means a lot of people," Halamka says.

He's helped more than 1,000 doctors in Massachusetts to go electronic, creating 20 new jobs in the process. The doctors can use computers to access patient records and order tests and drugs. And the computers can prompt them about possible diagnoses and treatments.

Using his experiences in Massachusetts, Halamka calculates that equipping hundreds of thousands of doctors with computers would create about 200,000 new jobs — positions for training health personnel and running health systems. There also would be jobs in hardware and software companies, and the growing number of Internet companies that let people keep their own records online.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=99916019

I dont take the numbers at face value, but I do take the concept at face value.