Is Data the Cure-All?

Lessons From Health Care for Education Policymakers

By Bill Tucker

Kaiser Permanente’s 8.7 million members no longer gather up reams of old paper charts and prescription records when meeting with a new doctor. Instead, each of the health-care giant’s 14,000 physicians can instantly access patients’ electronic medical records—up-to-date digital archives of a patient’s medical history, complete with medications, vaccinations, and important safety information, such as allergies and any known reactions to medicine. This allows for greater convenience, but also for information-sharing across a multiplicity of doctors, nurses, specialists, and pharmacists.

Kaiser Permanente is one of the shining examples cited in the campaign to use information technology and better data to radically reform and improve health care. Increasingly, physicians and policymakers see information technology as an essential tool in controlling medical costs and improving the quality of care.

Electronic medical records, for example, hold the promise of eliminating redundant procedures, reducing errors, and improving the coordination of care among health providers. They also allow patients to actively manage and contribute to their own health and wellness, with automatic reminders for routine screenings and other prevention-oriented activities. And when aggregated across hundreds of thousands of patients, this electronic data provides a rich resource for researchers to identify treatments more rapidly and conduct clinical trials across a wide variety of demographic groups and settings. Tens of billions of dollars in federal economic-stimulus funds are...