'Healthcare is grossly under-engineered,' says Johns Hopkins' Pronovost (podcast)
January 18, 2013 by Arezu Sarvestani
Johns Hopkins patient safety expert Peter Pronovost on medical errors, medical device data and the role medtech must accept in preventing needless deaths.
Healthcare providers are looking to medical devices to play a new role in hospital care, providing a whole-patient view of health through technologies that talk to each other and help clinicians make decisions about treatment.
Dr. Peter Pronovost, a critical care physician and anesthesiologist as well as Johns Hopkins Medicine senior vice president for patient safety & quality, told MassDevice.com that healthcare has yet to make the kind of progress innovative technologies have brought to other industries.
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"Ironically, healthcare has invested significantly in technology, but it's the only industry for which technology hasn't helped productivity or safety," Pronovost told us. "In part, that's because we've invested in individual devices, but we haven't looked at integrating them as systems."
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Our conversation with Pronovost followed his appearance at the Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit in Laguna Beach, Calif., last Sunday and Monday, where he and other healthcare stakeholders asked medical device makers to pledge to open up their devices to share data and develop interoperability around patient care and monitoring.
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