Statistically speaking: Freakonomics on healthcare

By Kristin Courtemanche, Contributing Writer

ORLANDO, Fla. — Steven Levitt is not your father’s economist.
In fact, he is unlike any other economist out there. Famed for co-authoring the 2005 non-fiction hit Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Levitt challenges the paradigm by reviewing data in unusual ways to reveal facets of issues that would otherwise remain obscure.

One of the stated fundamental ideas behind Freakonomics is that “knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.” HIMSS08 Conference attendees will doubtless be intrigued to hear from Levitt, slated to give a keynote address on Thursday, February 28. It is hoped he may share his opinion on which areas in the healthcare IT field could benefit from a Freakonomics-style inquiry.

Currently the Alvin H. Baum Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and also director of The Becker Center of Chicago Price Theory, Levitt recently was named one of Time magazine’s “100 People Who Shape Our World” and is a regular contributor to the Freakonomics blog at The New York Times.

One of Levitt’s oft-cited articles describes the surprisingly wide gap between physicians’ perception of the frequency they engage in handwashing versus the actual frequency as observed by a covert nursing team at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The realization by hospital administrators that their own doctors were in flagrant violation of basic health guidelines spurred them to initiate a handwashing campaign consisting of a photograph of disgusting bacterial cultures found on one doctor’s hand deployed to screen savers on all hospital computers: the resulting jump in handwashing frequency was immediate and striking.

One wonders what sort of positive change could be affected on the massively complex healthcare IT landscape if one knew where to evaluate it for potential weaknesses; perhaps Levitt will illuminate them in his keynote.

Posted by Kristin Courtemanche on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 10:41 am
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