America Ages — and Aches

Today, approximately 15% of Americans, some 46 million of us, are age 65 or older. Fast forward 40 years and the ranks of those eligible for Chronic Care Management are projected to reach nearly 100 million, about a quarter of the U.S. population. The exact numbers are anyone’s guess, but the trends are clear: Americans are living longer than ever. Medicine continues to make remarkable advances in the prevention and treatment of disease.

Do you live in a busy urban area? Do you work in healthcare? Do you multitask?

If you said yes to the first two, we can guarantee you said yes to the third.

Riverdale Family Practice (RFP) knows firsthand what busy is. Marking their 30th year in the Kingsbridge/Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, New York, RFP serves more than 35,000 people — young and old, rich and poor, from every corner of their neighborhood — which in the Bronx means from every corner of the globe.

In an ideal world, every medical encounter would begin with the provider having the patient’s complete medical history. Every diagnosis. Every medication. Every allergy.

For now, we live in a real world, where information is often scattered throughout medical systems.

Can interoperability defeat the asymmetry beast?

In healthcare IT, the problem isn’t too much data — providers want to know everything they can about individual patients and patient populations — but how to make sense of it all. For many years, medical professionals have devoted countless hours and legions of people to sorting and sifting medical records.

Take a close look at the health profile of the state of Arkansas, and by almost any measure there’s cause for concern, with one of the nation’s highest rates of obesity and related conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.