A report published in May by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) calls on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to transform healthcare nationally by engineering a "robust" health information infrastructure, according to an article on the Fierce Healthcare website.
Researchers from the National Quality Forum in the District of Columbia who helped create the report discussed its recommendations in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"During the next years of implementation of the Affordable Care Act, systems engineering should become a core function for improving the health of all Americans," they said.
For instance, the researchers said the current fee-for-service model represents the No. 1 hurdle to use of such engineering. To that end, payment systems must be aligned with desired patient outcomes, citing that while Seattle-based Virginia Mason Medical Center was able to reduce wait times and speed patient recoveries through the use of production system tools to redesign its spine clinic, the hospital still lost money.
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