Attempts to overhaul the nation's fractured health-care system cannot be done piecemeal, former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said.

Speaking Wednesday as the founder of The Center for Health Transformation, Gingrich told a noon gathering at the Wells Fargo Building downtown that small changes or reactionary fixes to separate pieces of the current systems "have not and will not work. We need a systemwide transformation."

With gaps in the layers of the current system, whether Medicaid, Medicare or the employer-based insurance programs where most people obtain medical-care coverage, changes so far have been "tinkering around the edges. Transformation requires both a big vision and reform proposals that resonate with the public and with providers."

Medical insurance premiums have nearly doubled the past eight years — they are up by nearly 90 percent since 2000, according to a national report released last week. The cost of services are up as dramatically, driven by the urgent pursuit of the latest technological advance, no matter the ultimate effect of general health of the population, Gingrich said.

"Studies have shown that most health care is not based on clinical studies of what works best and what does not, be it a test, treatment, drug or technology," he said. "Instead, most care is based on informed opinion, personal observation or tradition."

With that kind of system, he said, "it is no surprise that the United States spends more than twice as much per capita on health care compared to almost every other country in the world, and with worse health quality than most industrialized nations."

And for that, nearly 100,000 Americans are killed every year by preventable medical errors, and poor coordination of care result in multiple unnecessary treatments, lost time and money.

"We can do better if doctors have better access to concise, evidence-based medical information," he said, noting that an estimated 78 percent of U.S. households had a computer in 2007, but only 11 percent of physician offices report using computers to increase efficiency and quality of care.

A notable exception to the rule, he said, is Intermountain Healthcare, the Utah nonprofit health-care system and member of Gingrich's center. At IHC, 80 percent of the care is based on evidence, Gingrich said. Treatment data is collected by electronic medical records. The data is analyzed by researchers, and the best practices are then incorporated into the clinical process, resulting in far better quality care at a cost that is one-third less than the national average.

Gingrich supports a mandatory system of health-care records similar to IHC's model on a national scale that would involve a multibillion-dollar computer upgrade the former Georgia congressman wants subsidized by the federal government and put in place by December 2012. He said moving to a paperless system would save taxpayers billions of dollars in fraudulent claims and abuse and would more than cover its costs after a few years.

That is just one aspect of the impossibly complicated and unsustainably expensive U.S. health-care system, he said, which on a whole "behaves like a hidebound, tradition-based ballclub that chases after aging sluggers and plays by the old rules: We pay too much and get too little in return."

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E-mail: jthalman@desnews.com