January 2011 - The Health Care Blog

Defining a Maturity Model for HIEs

By JOHN MOORE Before entering the convoluted healthcare IT sector, I had worked in the manufacturing sector both as an IT analyst and in corporate strategy for Europe’s second largest enterprise software company. In those many years I learn quite... Read...

Published Sun, Jan 30 2011 8:39 AM by The Health Care Blog

Why Christians Should Support Health Care Rationing

By CHARLES CAMOSY It's coming. Health care reform, Round II. Republicans pledged to do it as part of their manifesto during the midterm election campaigns. And House Speaker John Boehner, less than a day after the elections, vowed that the... Read...

Published Sun, Jan 09 2011 9:44 AM by The Health Care Blog

Healthcare Insurance Future: Brokers, Consultants, Agents

By JOE FLOWER When people and companies buy healthcare insurance, they usually go through a broker, a consultant, or an agent. Agents sell insurance from one company, brokers from many companies; both make a commission—a percentage of the premium. Consultants...

Published Mon, Jan 10 2011 5:18 AM by The Health Care Blog

Hospital Culture and Surviving the New Landscape

By KENT BOTTLES, MD A recent flight on Southwest reminded me of the importance of culture in navigating change in a rapidly evolving environment like we have in health care in the United States today. It is all too easy... Read More...

Published Tue, Jan 11 2011 6:55 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Kent Bottles, ACOs, Culture

What Do Medical Errors Cost Your State?

By PAUL LEVY GE Healthcare offers this calculator, based on data from the Society of Actuaries, to show the cost of medical errors for a given population. I inserted the population of Massachusetts from the most recent US Census to... Read More...

Published Wed, Jan 12 2011 6:25 AM by The Health Care Blog

The Myth of Consumer-Directed Health Care

By JANE SARASOHN-KAHN The theory behind “consumer-driven health care” is that when the health care user has more financial ‘skin in the game,’ they’ll become more informed and effective purchasers of health care for themselves and their families. That...

Published Thu, Jan 13 2011 8:29 AM by The Health Care Blog

Physician Executives Should Not Ignore How Smartphones Will Transform Healthcare

By KENT BOTTLES Physician executives who ignore smartphones and their healthcare applications will miss the most important disruptive technology trend in the next five years. Physician executives who understand how smartphones will transform the industry...

Published Mon, Jan 31 2011 10:11 PM by The Health Care Blog

2010 Unplugged

By BOB WACHTER, MD For people like me, who, perversely enough, get a certain thrill from studying healthcare policy, there's never been a more exciting, if also dizzying, year than 2010. Passage of the reform bill last March was only... Read More...

Published Mon, Jan 03 2011 7:23 AM by The Health Care Blog

So, Are EHRs a Waste of Time and Money?

By ROGER COLLIER The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) authorized incentive payments, potentially totaling some $27 billion over ten years, to clinicians and hospitals when they implement electronic health...

Published Mon, Jan 17 2011 6:07 AM by The Health Care Blog

Putting the Patient First, Literally

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD Interoperability is front and center, again. Stage 1 of HITECH was about health records for doctors. Stage 2 is about interoperability. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report is all about interoperability...

Published Tue, Jan 18 2011 5:00 AM by The Health Care Blog

Insurance Exchange Budgets: How Much is Needed?

By ROGER COLLIER It’s coming up to four months since the Department of Health and Human Services awarded more than $50 million in grants to states and US possessions for health insurance exchange planning and development, and the money is... Read More...

Published Wed, Jan 19 2011 4:09 AM by The Health Care Blog

The End of the World as We Know It

By PAUL LEVY One aspect of religious dogma that has entered the medical world is that fee-for-service pricing of medical services is bad and should be replaced by a capitated, or global, arrangement that establishes an annual budget for care... Read More...

Published Thu, Jan 20 2011 8:03 AM by The Health Care Blog

Health 2.0 Live Code-a-thons for 2011

Health 2.0 will host the first three Developer Challenge Code-a-thons for 2011 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington, DC, and Boston. These events occur over the course of one day in each city, bringing together developers, designers and raw... Read...

Published Wed, Jan 19 2011 11:00 PM by The Health Care Blog

Comment on the PCAST Report

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE This comment is not in response to the specific questions posed by ONC, which seem to presume a certain validity of the PCAST report. This comment is respectfully raising several basic questions, which in my opinion, the... Read More...

Published Fri, Jan 21 2011 4:02 AM by The Health Care Blog

Is the Culture Finally Shifting?

By DAVE deBronkhart Thanks to friend Kavita Patel for pointing out this sign of shifting winds, in this week’s Time online: Googling Symptoms Helps Patients and Doctors. It’s a watershed moment, because the last physician column I saw on this... Read...

Published Sat, Jan 22 2011 9:55 AM by The Health Care Blog