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American Medicine

Healthcare in America is becoming more complex. As described by M. Smith and coauthors in their recent article, “What’s Needed Is a Health Care System That Learns,” each Medicare patient now has an average of 7 doctors in 4 different practices, and each doctor must interact with over 200 other physicians to care for all of the practice’s Medicare patients. It is expected that the increase in chronic conditions by 26% between 2000 and 2020 would require each doctor to work 21 hours per day to give quality comprehensive care to the doctor’s patients. Of course, this can’t happen.

It is obvious that the American healthcare system needs simplification and efficiency to deliver comprehensive care to each patient, to you and to me, in the future. How can we find the best methods to do this?

One possible solution is to use electronic medical records to identify the most effective new practices from all care throughout the country. To achieve this, the Institute of Medicine has called for a “continuously learning health care” system using information from electronic medical records of all, or nearly all, patients in America. This information could identify methods of care that work well, and methods that fail. The best methods would then be implemented more widely, and rapidly, so patients would do better.

Here are tips to help you get continuously good care:

• Prefer to get care from a doctor who uses an electronic medical record. In this way your data will help you and others. Doctors who use electronic records will more likely be the first to implement better methods.
• Try to choose a doctor who has a patient portal, where you can ask questions and get answers without having to go to the doctor’s office.
• Use the internet to get up to date information about your conditions and disease prevention as it is continuously updated.
• Make sure to ask about all your treatments as well as prevention.

For more information on electronic medical records and other tips to get the best care you can, check out Surviving American Medicine.