The Kaiser Family Foundation conducts research and studies regarding healthcare services, medical care and policy initiatives. Among the topics they have been investigating are the effects of technology on the practice of medicine in the present day. A paper released last fall, “The Effect of Technology on Healthcare: Research Findings in Three Countries,” by Kaiser Associate Health Professor Rachel Killip, examined whether doctors in rural communities around the United States embraced new technologies more quickly than their counterparts in urban areas. The study compared two groups of physicians: one in rural Iowa, located close to home, where advancements in diagnostic technology had been slow and unnoticeable; and another in New York City, close to the business and social scene of the downtown setting, where the rapid adoption of technology had been more pronounced.
Although Killip found that physicians in rural areas had more complaints about patient care, there was no difference in the number of physician-related callbacks or visits for surgical procedures between the groups. There were no significant differences in the number of new patients seeking elective surgery or treatments. In both cities, the people receiving such elective care tended to be older and male. This led the researchers to conclude that technology was more influential on the decision to accept a surgical treatment rather than on the physician’s own attitudes and judgment. This conclusion flies in the face of the idea that technology is solely a positive influence, causing practitioners to act in a more caring and proactive manner.
One could argue that practitioners already use technology to their advantage. A quick look at the list of doctors who have embraced Google Glass or the like shows that they are indeed using computers and information technology to enhance their practice. This doesn’t mean that newer technology will automatically cause them to embrace it. They might instead decide that they are comfortable using it and not that they see technology as an effective way to do things.
Researchers know that health care workers are especially susceptible to biased treatment if they feel that they are being pushed toward a procedure or technology that is seen as benefiting their department. It makes sense then that efforts to conduct unbiased research may actually backfire because practitioners will resist any attempts to open up areas of debate. This can have real-life consequences for patients, creating a situation where they can get better treatment but it is done at a greater cost.
- There are ways that Kaiser has tried to address this problem.
- One plan is to require that physicians reveal anything they do with electronic health records to the nurses and other direct patient care staff.
- Another is to encourage greater use of e-discovery software to allow doctors to search for and present electronic files in a timely and accurate fashion.
- One of the biggest problems is that as technology improves and becomes more readily available to the public and physicians, these same practitioners may resist embracing the newest technology.
- As a result, accurate, unbiased research about what is really going on is severely limited.
This report was released before the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was introduced. The Privacy and Electronic Health Privacy Act give patients the right to get informed about the privacy policies of their health care providers. This means that research about what doctors are doing will not be prohibited, but Kaiser researchers fear that changes will occur because doctors and hospitals may choose to limit the benefits that come from using new technologies. What we found may make that task even more difficult. In the mean time, patients can check out the full report online at Kaiser.