Dr. Georgiou shares why people need to take control of their own health care and how they can do it by using data to determine the quality of care doctors and hospitals offer.
Dr. Georgiou:
When I finished medical school and my residency in internal medicine I went into practice; I practiced for five years. I absolutely loved my patients and I loved the clinical practice in medicine. But I also felt like there was more to medicine than just seeing one patient at a time and so my career took me down a different track and I went into the business of healthcare and went into corporate America.
And so I was fortunate to join a very large health insurance company that oversaw the care of 16 million people at that time, and I became the Chief Medical Officer of that organization, and what I learned from being in that world was that healthcare was really expensive. There was a lot that doctors and hospitals could improve about how they deliver care, but I also could see that there is a lot more that people can do to take control of their own healthcare.
One of the many things that I learned when I was in my corporate world was how important data is to making decisions about everything, including doctors and hospitals and the quality of the care that they offer. I really felt like I wanted to give back to the community by giving people data that they could easily use.
So, there are many, many sites that are available that offer free data on the quality of doctors and hospitals. However, you have to either be a data geek or a scientist or a researcher to use them and to be able to interpret them and really translate that data into information.
So what compelled me to launch and invest in My Health Compare was to have an easy-to-use site that anyone without any training to go on to the Internet, type in a few little data points and really be able to see quickly and easily what the comparison and quality of care was between hospitals that they were considering.
Unfortunately, people do differ to their doctor and to authority when it comes to their own medical decisions. If you can get web statistics on how frequently people get web statistics on how frequently people use the Internet to determine the next hotel that they are going to stay in or the next restaurant that they are going to eat a or the next car that they are going to buy they clearly use that information and tap into that information more than they tap into information about somebody is going to slice them open.
It’s also important to recognize that data alone doesn’t tell the entire story. It just tells the story that that data is structured to offer. And so, I certainly wouldn’t recommend that people just use data from My Health Compare or the US government and ignore recommendations from family and friends or from their doctor, but to use all of those data points to help make the best decision for them.
About Dr. Archelle Georgiou, M.D.:
Dr. Archelle Georgiou combines her deep knowledge of clinical medicine with a breadth of experience in business and health care administration to pursue her passion for simplifying the health care system. As a practicing physician and as a corporate managed care executive, Dr. Georgiou learned and leveraged the value and importance of simple and compelling communication to influence impacting patients’ personal health care behaviors as well as driving health care purchasing decisions and business growth.
Visit Dr. Georgiou at her website
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