To Reduce Medical Costs and Death

People living on a budget or conserving a finite sum care about needless financial waste. With a budget of $131 dollars the next 30 days I was unpleased to receive another bill of $200 dollars from the Wrangell Medical Clinic (in Alaska) that had no basis in reality, another month. So I considered the greater parameters of how the charge for an office visit came to be.

There are perhaps millions of people that need to get a prescription drug regularly. Even if the individual knows what it is they need, such as the generic drug Lysinopril to reduce high blood pressure, they must visit a physician or other medical provide and incur the cost of an office visit. I believe that computer software and networking could reduce the need for patient office visits to get prescriptions for non-narcotic drugs of various easy to control classes.

Public medical clinics that treat the lower middle class and poor at a reduced rate are useful. They often are the sole providers of medical services the poor can get. Even so financial and accounts personnel may feel free to mug the poor for whatever reason. The financial service sector and Wall Street deregulators were largely responsible for the 2008-9 economic crisis.

When I sought a prescription for Lysinopril I was informed that with the poor man’s discount the office visit would be eight dollars. They asked if I could pay. I filled out an eligibility form and paid eight dollars. Then was billed $200 dollars the next two months, and was yet given the $8 visit rate. Perhaps its a front loading white man’ discount, I cannot say.

There are numerous holes in the nation’s medical provisioning logic circuits that could stand improvement. Social security and I.R.S. income records should be available to some sort of national medical eligibility for service database integrated with medical screening for prescription drug renewals via automated machine.

It is easy to imagine an artificial intelligence program that can be automated to renew prescriptions for free that also provides simple medical screening. Then a patient would need only visit a regular medical office couple of years unless given so medical opinion b y the computer to go directly.

Blood pressure and pulse rates could be taken at the ATM-like machine that also asks twenty questions relevant to the patient’s condition. Medical experts would write the software along with good programmer-systems analysts. The data-base should be national and machines available to any retailer that wants them, perhaps near the pharmacy.

Apparently physicians also have problems that could be better addressed with systems analysis and new software and hardware. Physicians arriving at hospitals evidently take time at getting up to speed on the conditions of residents patients at shift changes and people die. So why not have a computer expert system that physicians enter their data about patients on while making rounds on a tablet computer. Then have an expert system evaluate and triage the condition and priority of each patient and assign a patient condition evaluation rating and condition synopsis.

At one central patient monitoring station each room, patient and patient rating would be presented in a multi-windowed video display in order of priority for the physician to examine before making rounds. The expert system could also create a patient visitation route and itinerary based on the expert system evaluation.

If the present system is such that a physicians goes along the line from room 1 to room 10, then if the patient in room ten is suffering from acute paper cut and the patient in room ten from rotten cardiac valve and West Nile virus complicated by stage three cancer and 2nd degree burns, the visitation order needs to be reversed, yet the physician may not know that until moving from 1 through 10.