News: IOM report says technology can reduce healthcare costs

The report proposed 10 broad goals including improving the digital infrastructure, streamlining regulations to improve data capture and use, and creating more clinically appropriate and convenient technological tools, among other items.

 

The 18-member committee which authored the report indicated that 30% of healthcare spending, some $750 billion, was wasted on “unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state.”