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Friday, July 9, 2010
IBM CEO Palmisano: Act together to change health data system
By Julie M. Donnelly
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IBM CEO and President Sam Palmisano was in Boston today to give the plenary address at the National Governors’ Association annual meeting at the Massachusetts State House. The focus of the plenary session is on health-care reform, and Palmisano warned in his speech that if health information remains siloed in isolated islands, we will waste the billions of dollars the federal government has put towards health information technology as part of the federal stimulus.
Palmisano said we must quickly establish data standards, because if health information doesn’t flow, we can’t have better health care. “We can put in place a system that is 99.7 percent accurate...But purists argue on and on and nothing gets done,” he said. Palmisano said it’s not about giving doctors iPhones but about making sure the system works.
He added that, as states develop new systems as part of national health reform, they must be designed to work together, and to achieve the states’ goals for interconnectivity, analytics and security. “We can’t bolt it on afterwards,” he said.
Palmisano is of the mind that analytics can serve as an out from spiraling health care costs, and he urged institutions to adopt health data analytics, saying they will see cost savings in the first year. He urged the states not to wait for national health reform to act but to work together now.
“We don’t need the federal government, we can do it ourselves,” Palmisano said.
Palmisano said he was speaking both as a giant payer of health-care costs, with 450,000 employees and retirees on IBM-sponsored health-care plans, and also as a vendor to the top hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies.
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