NYC Less Resistant to Change - More Hope for Healthcare Reform

I've decided to emphasize the point about how Americans fear change from my previous post and relate it to my opinion of NYC residents' and their typical behaviors. I think as a whole those residing in NYC are more open to change than those living in the rest of the country. The way I see it, those who experienced 9/11 have witnessed firsthand that following standard procedures and protocols is not always the best option. Stantard procedures and protocols need to constantly be changed to adapt to changes in society and the local environment. Those living in NYC at the time of the chaos can vouch for this need to adapt.

For this reason I think that NYC has a better shot at moving from paper based to electronic based document systems. I am pretty confident that the $105 million awarded in grants for community based health IT projects will not go to waste because of resistance to change. I think that NYC residents crave improvement and healthcare is most definitely an area that needs improvement.

The following graph is from a presentation given at the Improving Health-Care Statistics Through Electronic Medical Records and Health Information Exchange Workshop on May 29-30, 2007:


(Click the image to read the words in each bubble)

Basically, this graph shows that many different entities share the same medical records and thus using electronic based medical records has a big advantage. I think that NYC is likely to adopt to these changes.