Chapter 6: ISDN in Medicine and Health Care

The delivery and processing of health-care information appears to be a major key to reducing administrative costs, expediting patient care, speeding claims processing, reducing duplication and waste, and perhaps most importantly increasing accessibility to quality health care.

And just in time. For while the actual buying power of the average American has increased about one percent since 1980, the cost of health care during that time has ballooned by more than 163 percent. Health care costs, in fact, are growing today at about 13 percent a year.

Yet the studies say telecommunications can stem this tide, and that the aggressive deployment of electronic data systems offers two major benefits:

First, it can significantly reduce the cost of handling, storing and processing this mountain of information. According to the consulting firm of Arthur D. Little, almost 14 percent of the nation's total expenditure for health care is spent on managing this data - most of which is still initiated, transferred and at least partially processed as paper.

Second, the easy availability of information appears to be a major factor in reducing the duplication of routine tests, radiological workups, and the perpetually repeated entry of basic patient medical histories.