Medical Technology Exposed

Capitalism at its finest…
One way to encourage medical practitioners to improve themselves is to pay them more if they do. This is something that the government is intensely focused on. The concept of “pay for performance” has been kicked around for years. Recently the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) initiated the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) as an attempt at doing just that. As a sort of “management based objective,” doctors that report certain information on Medicare patients can expect a higher percentage of compensation. This is absolutely a step in the right direction. Although I am curious about the effectiveness of this program in its current form. There are several issues preventing the expansion and subsequent improvement of this initiative. First of all, communication to doctors is notoriously a difficult task. Secondly, a growing number of doctors do not take Medicare patients, due to the low reimbursement. Finally, doctors are notoriously bad at record keeping. In fact they usually employ an often underpaid individual for this task. Counter-intuitive, right?

The good news is that as information technology becomes more integrated into private practices, this will become more widely adopted and expanded.