Medicine in the information age: it industry steps up to curb health care inefficiencies.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: MEDICAL TECH

The Institute of Medicine found that 30 percent of U.S. health care spending in 2009 was waste. That's S765 billion. And skyrocketing costs have ballooned at a rate that's more than triple that of wages over the past decade.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Many believe information technology is health care's last hope for reducing waste and capping costs. With more than a trillion dollars worth of fruit hanging from branches of heights, health care most definitely has the tech world's full attention, and there are a host of federal financial incentives set to go into effect soon.

Amid this landscape, it's no surprise Colorado is home to a notable and growing cluster of health care IT companies. Some provide tools to the masses to help manage their own care, some are aimed squarely at health care professionals, and of hers still look to bridge the often unwieldy gap between the two.

"Ultimately, information has been underutilized in health care," says Evan Marks, vice president of informatics and strategy at Denver-based HealthGrades. "It's been used by pharma and device manufacturers, but in terms of the broad application of informatics health care has really lagged."

Marks says the reticence of the industry to adopt new technologies led to numerous mandates and incentives in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). "Efficiency in other businesses is really rewarded, but in health care, the sloppier your business was, the more money you made. With the ACA, a lot of the disincentives have changed. Hospitals are no longer rewarded for had behavior."

According to Marks, the health care industry needs to self-assess with the tools afforded by modern IT. "Just like every other business, whether they're an assembly line or a bank."

HealthGrades has been doing just that since 1998. With about 200 of its 600 Denver-based employees, the formerly publicly traded company was taken private in 2010, but its core business remains the same: to offer consumers information on practitioners and hospitals.

The company evaluates health care providers on 35 procedures and practice areas from hip replacement to neurosurgery and delivers the results to the public via HealthGrades.com and BetterMedicine.com.

Marks says the company helps cut costs by allowing for analytics-based targeted marketing campaigns, rather than billboards and direct mail. "When those campaigns are ill-informed, the costs associated with producing materials and reaching a largely inappropriate audience are...