Obama at The Cleveland Clinic

President Barack Obama will be in Cleveland today, visiting the world-renown Cleveland Clinic to discuss his controversial health-care plan. He plans to use the Clinic as an example of what good can come from investing in technology and working to increase efficiency. Obama praised the Clinic last month in a letter to Sens. Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus:

We need to learn from their successes and replicate those best practices across our country

He more recently called the Clinic a "role model," along with other health institutions like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. A major source of that praise stems from the Clinic's new patient controlled Personal Health Record system. A recent collaboration with Google has given patients the ability to share their health information with doctors, surgeons, and pharmacists as they chose. Google Health is being seen as the first step toward a personal health data management system that will allow patients complete control over their health histories, which will reduce the hassle and mistakes that occur when transferring health care providers. This will be an invaluable transition as not only the sheer volume of health-related information spirals upward, but also as medicine becomes increasing collaborative and personal.

Another reason why the Cleveland Clinic health service practices are considered top notch, is there commitment to efficiency of care, which often times leads to shorter and less expensive hospital stays. As recently reported in the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care 2008, an average Medicare patient's hospital stay at the Cleveland Clinics around 2/3 that of comparable hospitals, while having and average cost per day around 30% less. This all means that even if individual procedures cost more at the Cleveland Clinic, patients are more likely to spend less time and money there overall.

Hopefully the plan that President Obama has on the table will help to health care costs across the board. I know my parents can't afford their current plan for very long, now that my dad has been laid off.