technology and healthcare cont.

Automated contact centers at hospitals and insurance companies also help reduce our healthcare costs. [1] Interestingly, I found this information from another blog known as the Communications and Technology Blog, which might make this claim a bit biased towards whatever company the blogger works for. However, his reason – automated answering systems reduces the costs of employing workers for simple questions such as office hours – seems legitimate. A more general way that technology decreases healthcare costs is that as more over-the-counter drugs become available in more places (CVS, Wal-Mart), people don’t have to travel as far to obtain the drugs, reducing the traveling costs. As I mentioned in my previous blog, the electronic system reduces the costs of paperwork. This, in turn, also decreases the costs of hiring a number of employees needed to enter this paperwork information into databases each time. Metavante, a financial technology service company, claims that for one medical practice, only 4 staffs are needed instead of 12 to work on information from insurance payers.[2] This claim obviously has a vested financial interest because it wants people to join its company. Nevertheless, the digital world does reduce the number of employees needed to manage a medical practice.

[1] Tehrani, Rich. Nortel: Unified Communications Reduces Healthcare Costs. (2009). http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/nortel/nortel-unified-communications-reduces-healthcare-costs.html

[2] Metavante. Technology Reduces Healthcare Costs, Drives Efficiencies for Providers. (2009). http://www.metavante.com/cmspub/groups/public/documents/document/mvp0_014945.pdf