February 2010 - The Health Care Blog

McAllen, TX As Outlier? Why Not Houston?

By MERRILL GOOZNER Or Lubbock? Or Oklahoma City? Or New Orleans? Or any of a dozen major and minor metro areas throughout the South? According to the Medicare Payments Advisory Commission, all of them have significantly higher usage rates and... Read...

Published Fri, Feb 19 2010 4:47 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Merrill Goozner, McAllen

CCD Standard Gaining Traction, CCR Fading

By JOHN MOORE In a number of interviews with leading HIE vendors, it is becoming clear that the clinical standard, Continuity of Care Document (CCD) will be the dominant standard in the future. The leading competing standard, Continuity of Care... Read...

Published Mon, Feb 22 2010 2:00 AM by The Health Care Blog

Check Lists and Decision Trees versus Spontaneity and Imagination

By KENT BOTTLES The task of health care reform in 21st century America is to decrease per-capita cost of care and to increase the quality of care delivered to patients. It’s complicated. A famous Rand study concluded that Americans only... Read More....

Published Mon, Feb 01 2010 10:51 PM by The Health Care Blog

The President’s Proposal

By MAGGIE MAHAR You might be wondering why I haven’t written about the President’s Health care bill. The reason is that I have very little to say. This, I realize, is unusual. But the truth is that the president’s proposal... Read More...

Published Tue, Feb 23 2010 6:28 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Obama, Maggie Mahar

Bentley & Stanton: Two UK docs talk about Health 2.0

By Matthew Holt Last week in London I met with two of the brightest lights in the UK's community of physicians looking at Health 2.0. Annabel Bentley is the medical director and head of informatics at Bupa, the UK-based non-profit... Read More...

Published Wed, Feb 24 2010 8:22 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Health 2.0, Matthew Holt, Health Plans, e-patients, International

More of the Same, Only More Expensive

By SARAH PALIN The President has wrestled control of the health care debate away from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by finally introducing his own plan. Unfortunately, the White House’s proposal includes everything we found untenable about the old Senate...

Published Thu, Feb 25 2010 10:00 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Sarah Palin

Paris, Here We <s>Come</s> Are

By Matthew Holt For those of you just getting up on Friday, here's a little taste of the atmosphere we're drinking in for the upcoming Health 2.0 Europe conference. And yes, we have been working hard here too! Health 2.0... Read More...

Published Fri, Feb 26 2010 6:36 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Health 2.0

Tough day for Wellpoint

By Matthew Holt Following my cynicism about the Braly WSJ interview, not only have they been called out by the Secretary of HHS, but now they’re really in trouble. The Mommybloggers are after them… Read More...

Published Mon, Feb 08 2010 11:03 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Matthew Holt, Health Plans

Massachusetts’ Problem and Maryland’s Solution

By MAGGIE MAHAR While health care reformers argue about what it would take to “break the curve” of health care inflation, the state of Maryland has done it, at least when it comes to hospital spending. In 1977, Maryland decided... Read More...

Published Tue, Feb 09 2010 9:05 PM by The Health Care Blog

A new campaign against childhood obesity

By Matthew Holt There are intractable long-term problems and then there's America's waistlines. And in particular there's the issue of childhood obesity. I shudder to think what we can do about it, and recently interviewed Alan Greene on the...

Published Fri, Feb 12 2010 1:43 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Matthew Holt, Patients, Consumers

Who does PhRMA need next? Robin Strongin thinks she knows

By Matthew Holt I met Billy Tauzin last summer in Aspen and you couldn’t help but love the guy. He had that amazing Louisiana charm, and was helping PhRMA walk a tightrope between being the bad guys, and giving away... Read More...

Published Sat, Feb 13 2010 8:45 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Pharma

Simple Steps to Meaningful Health Reform

By KIM BELLARD Now that health reform at the federal level seems to have hit an impasse, Congress and the Administration are scrambling to see if anything can be salvaged this year. Although both the House and Senate bills are... Read More...

Published Wed, Feb 03 2010 6:44 AM by The Health Care Blog

Todd Park speaks: Free the data!

By Matthew Holt Todd Park is definitely one of health care IT’s good guys. Todd was the brains (but not the mouth!) behind athenahealth. Since he left athenahealth, he spent a year back in California doing angel investing (Ventana among... Read More....

Published Thu, Feb 04 2010 4:18 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Technology, Health 2.0, Policy/Politics, Matthew Holt, Policy

Why Calculators Are the Future of Healthcare

By THOMAS GOETZ Want to know the future of medicine and healthcare in one sentence? For my money, it goes like this: The real opportunity in healthcare is to combine our personal data with the huge amount of general biomedical... Read More...

Published Fri, Feb 05 2010 5:35 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Thomas Goetz

Government to Account For More Than Half of Healthcare Spending

By MERRILL GOOZNER Amid all the gloomy numbers in the latest government projections for health care spending, one statistic stands out: Public sector involvement in health care this year will surpass private sector spending for the first time in U.S....

Published Sun, Feb 07 2010 4:45 AM by The Health Care Blog