During the rancorous debate over President Obama's health care plan, various factions could agree on one thing: Health care in the U.S. is riddled with waste. That waste has cost billions of dollars and perhaps millions of lives.
By organizing data related to patients' behavior and to drug development, digital technology could eliminate that waste and preserve the public's health more drastically than any wonder drug.
The technology for that transformation is already here, said Jonathan Richman, director of social media at the marketing agency Possible Worldwide and author of the health care blog Dose of Digital. Speaking March 13 at thehere, Richman detailed how smart data analysis could perform the seemingly contradictory tasks of improving patient health and improving the profits of pharma and insurance companies.
"There’s really an interesting intersection between digital infrastructure and health care,” Richman said. "Rather than making new drugs, is there a way to use digital technology to make existing drugs more powerful? Instead of looking at the biology side, I say let’s focus on the technology side. Use technology we have, or soon will have, to improve health care.”
Richman identified drug use and drug prediction as the key areas where digital technology could streamline and improve health care to the benefit of everyone involved.
Under the current system, he said, both patients and pharmaceutical companies misuse the many powerful and helpful medications at their disposal. On the patient side, the refusal , or the failure to use it correctly, costs $290 billion a year, Richman said. For breast cancer alone, 20 percent of women stop taking their med
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