Re: [Marxism] Re: Coates & Schaffer: Recrudescent debate on Schiavo

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

Hari raises a crucial point in forcing us to say explicitly what is socially 
progressive -- and what isn't -- in the introduction and use of IT in 
healthcare. As someone whose daily job is to tally and graph the data produced 
by that IT in a hospital, it's clear to me the way technology has been applied 
is typical of its application in any institution, profit or nonprofit, under 
capitalism.

I can't imagine how hospitals can function today without computerized systems 
tracking patients, billing, orders, diagnoses and procedures. Yet it makes me 
want to scream when we have to deal with several proprietary (for-profit) 
computerized systems within one institution which WE (the hospital) have to 
figure out how to integrate (the VA is a partial exception to this problem).

Charley Richardson had a piece a couple months ago in Labor Notes on the need 
for nurses and other healthcare workers to control how IT is introduced into 
the workplace, especially as it deskills and/or threatens their jobs.

IT has a crucial role in reducing medical errors, yet is hamstrung in doing so 
in the way, and by whom, it is implemented, which I'll get into more later.

The latest idiocy in the misuse of IT (yet a very smart move from "their" 
perspective) is "pay-for-performance" systems -- see the dispute in St. Louis 
this week where autoworkers, doctors and others are up in arms over being 
denied access to healthcare providers, because a handful of diagnostic 
measures, tracked by IT, are used NOT to improve quality, but to become an 
excuse for insurers to exclude docs and others who fall below an arbitrary 
level reflected in the data used to track these measures. And yet the measures 
themselves CAN, and ARE, being used legitimately by providers to track and 
treat real ills.

Just another day under capitalism...
Andy

-- <hari.kumar@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What is your point?
Is it worth making minute steps forward, or is it worthless?
Please explain what you would say is your view: Not to an old Stalinist M-List, 
but to the nurses and doctors and respiratory techs and ward pharmacists at the 
bedside.


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