Here's one way to improve the quality of the nation's healthcare

One way to improve the nation’s healthcare quality is to start effectively analyzing medical data using modern technology in clinics and hospitals. This is something that the industry hasn’t done just yet, according to pediatric surgeon Hanmin Lee of the University of California, San Francisco. “We don’t have one unified electronic medical record system. So it is hard to aggregate big data, but I believe we are on the cusp of that. ” Lee says diagnostic methods should be improved too. “For instance, the data that the nurses collect to determine whether a patient is in a good or bad nutritional status is they record how much food is left on a patient’s tray when it gets taken away by the support staff. So that’s the best metric to ascertain whether or not patients are at high or low risk of decubitus ulcers. To currently use this, it borders on the preposterous.” According to Lee, with a modernized approach to data and technology, doctors could better understand diseases and bring precision medicine to fruition.