Opinion: Healthcare's 'productivity paradox' may be short lived

In 1987, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow famously quipped: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." You could say the same thing about health care today. Spending on health care information technology has risen rapidly over the past decade, but there been little corresponding gain in health care productivity. Instead, the industry's labor force has been on a growth spurt — creating health care's version of a productivity paradox. Between 2003 and 2011, the health care sector nationwide added 2.67 million jobs while the entire rest of the U.S. economy added just 850,000 jobs, according to the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.