If the United States health care system is to become affordable and effective, then a greater emphasis on technology, transparency and the quality of care is needed to make the system more efficient, said U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donahue at a health care roundtable Tuesday, in Washington, DC.
"We underutilize information technology [in health care]more than we do in any modern business," Donahue said.
Donahue referred to frivolous medical lawsuits as another system inefficiency. Such practices force doctors to practice defensive medicine, which causes the cost (in time and dollars) of treatment to rise, according to Donahue.
Because the health care industry lacks sufficient transparency, patients often don't know what kind of care they're receiving, Donahue said. He cited the nearly 100,000 Americans who die annually from preventable medical errors and the 1.5 million who suffer the consequences of prescription drug mistakes as evidence that the quality of care in the system is uneven.
He identified the 77 million baby boomers getting ready to retire and a portion of the roughly 45 million uninsured Americans as two of the populations with the most pressing needs.
Investing in more care for the bottom one-third of uninsured Americans and improving health care IT to enhance the strengths of the current employer-based system would yield a higher return than a government-operated national system, Donahue said.
