The Technology Patch for Health Care Woes

The U.S. spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country. Yet, a 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine called To Err is Human found medical errors to be responsible for approximately 98,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. To put this in perspective, the number of deaths attributed to medical errors is about the equivalent to crashing a fully loaded 747 every day for a year.

Those two statistics illustrate the main challenges facing medicine today: runaway costs, and an unacceptable number of poor outcomes. To be sure, the Institute of Medicine’s eye-opening report is a decade old. But if the number of deaths due to medical error has changed, the change hasn’t been dramatic enough.

As we all add more gadgets and devices to streamline our daily lives, the next question is, what can the tools and advancements of modern technology do to fix healthcare?