A conversation with Dale Sanders
(continued)
JHIM Online: What could systems such as the Antibiotic Assistant mean for the future of healthcare economics?
Mr. Sanders: The Antibiotic Assistant started out as a decision-support tool to simply display to physicians what the best antibiotic protocol would be given a particular pathology report or a susceptibility report for a particular infection. Scott Evans [the system’s creator] collected outcomes data and he collected lab data that describe this relationship between the infection and the most effective antibiotic protocol. Through this tool he could start recommending to physicians, based on historical data, which protocols seemed to best fit that particular strain of bacteria in terms of outcomes.
The next version of the program dealt with cost. Administrators were saying that they didn’t always want to recommend the most expensive protocol. Scott recognized that it would be easy to extend the data model to include the costs protocols. And he ended up with a diagnosis, the protocol or protocols, and the cost for each of those protocols, as well as the predicted outcomes in a single perspective. It’s a model that is tailor-made for broader use in healthcare.
JHIM Online: What is the commoditization of knowledge and how can a CIO prepare his or her healthcare organization for it?
Mr. Sanders: I think CIOs need to recognize where technology and knowledge are going to be commoditized next, and enable that to happen faster. For instance, the smartest, most well-informed patients tend to be the best patients. So the more we can help them become wiser about themselves, wiser about their health, wiser about their care protocol, and wiser and more involved in the management of their own disease, then the better they will be and the better the outcomes will be.
In the past, old-style healthcare would put a lot of emphasis on the physician making all the decisions with very little feedback from the patient. Today, we need to start thinking about how to involve the patient in an exchange of knowledge. We can push knowledge out to patients more effectively than we are now.
Dale Sanders is vice president of Information Services/CIO, Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation.
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