Thursday, October 30, 2008

Stats-based healthcare

Op-Ed Contributors - How to Take American Health Care From Worst to First - NYTimes.com

I agree with the sentiment of the article. We can stand to bring more empirical evidence into our healthcare and use our information technology to improve care. However, I don't agree with the notion that it will be easy. The reason we have more data on our fantasy baseball third baseman is simply that data is easier and less expensive to collect.

The effort that Beane, Gingrich, and Kerry describes will be quite hard, as there are lots of difficulties in electronic medical records that need to be sorted out. But I think it is a necessary effort and will be worth the investment.