March 2011 - The Health Care Blog

Does the GOP Have a Health Plan?

By JOHN GOODMAN The Republicans have no plan to insure the uninsured. How do I know that? A New York Times editorial told me. So did Ezra Klein, writing in The Washington Post. Matt Miller, also writing in the Post, went further. “I’m willing...

Published Thu, Mar 31 2011 1:14 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, John Goodman, Politics, Obamacare, GOP, Healthcare reform

How the Veterans are Winning the War

By PAUL LEVY At a seminar last night at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School, one of the students asked a question along the lines of, “How do you know when you have done too much with regard to transparency?”...

Published Thu, Mar 31 2011 6:34 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Quality, Transparency, Kennedy School of Government, VA Medical System, BIDMC

Shaken, Flooded, Stressed by Power Outages, Fukushima Daiichi Moves into Second Place

By ROD ADAMS Two weeks ago, I wrote an article titled Nuclear plant issues in Japan are the least of their worries that attempted to provide a realistic prediction of the worst case consequences of the one-two punch from a very large earthquake and tsunami...

Published Thu, Mar 31 2011 6:06 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Rod Adams, Radiation, Fukushima Daiichi, Nuclear energy

Conflicts Of Interest In Guideline Development: A Dirty Little Secret Gets Aired Again

By DAVID WILLIAMS An Archives of Internal Medicine article (Conflicts of Interest in Cardiovascular Clinical Practice Guidelines) is getting a lot of notice today. In essence, many of the physicians who develop guideline that influence practice patterns...

Published Thu, Mar 31 2011 4:19 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Quality, NIH, cardiology, Conflict of interest, Guidelines, Eli Lilly, Archives of Internal Medicine

The 6th Thing to Watch in the Medicare ACO Regulations

By VINCE KURATIS Health care lobbyists and advocates are bracing for six pages of the health care reform law to explode into more than 1,000 pages of federal regulations when the Department of Health and Human Services releases its long-delayed accountable...

Published Wed, Mar 30 2011 4:17 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, ACOs

Does My Doctor Trust Me (and Does It Matter)?

By JESSIE GRUMAN Members of the American public are frequently surveyed about their trust in various professionals. Doctors and nurses usually wind up near the top of the list, especially when compared to lawyers, hairdressers and politicians. Trust in...

Published Wed, Mar 30 2011 9:58 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Jessie Gruman, Doctors and Patients

Potassium Iodide Pills

By DEREK LOWE Well, the nuclear crisis in Japan seems to be causing a run on potassium iodide (KI), and not just in Japan. If news reports are to be believed, people in many other regions (such as the west coast of the US and Canada) are stocking up,...

Published Wed, Mar 30 2011 8:58 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Derek Lowe, The Insider's Guide to Health Care, Postassium iodide, Radioactive iodine

Remember: Technology is but a Tool

By JOHN MOORE Yesterday, Chilmark Research participated in the CRG conference, Driving Change Through Managed Care IT from Provider Payments to Quality, which was held in New York City. Despite having a title that no one will be able to remember, the...

Published Wed, Mar 30 2011 8:04 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: EHR, THCB, John Moore, Workflow, Process, Payers

Oregon Death with Dignity Act vindicated

To no one rational’s surprise, a study confirms that those few Oregon patients (400 over 10 years) who chose legal physician assisted suicide in case of terminal illness had a better quality of death than those who didn’t. Sadly because those...

Published Wed, Mar 30 2011 7:53 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Policy, Quality, micro

ACOs: Unicorn breeding rules emerging

Mark Smith, the President of the California Health Care Foundation, jokes that ACOs are like unicorns–mythical beasts that no one has yet seen. Well today Politico reports that–just like the Kennel club certifying a new breed of dog–CMS...

Published Wed, Mar 30 2011 7:12 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: micro

A Growing Chorus on the RUC

By BRIAN KLEPPER Yesterday on Kaiser Health News, Barbara Levy MD, the Chair of the AMA’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (or RUC), published a glowing defense of the RUC’s activities. Her article extols the work of the 29 physician...

Published Tue, Mar 29 2011 12:42 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB

Which Way Transparency Nirvana?

By MICHAEL PAINTER, MD First the good news—many are pushing the envelope on public reporting of health care information these days. For instance, last week the HHS/Health 2.0 Developer Challenge awarded honors to a new mobile app—using Hospital Compare...

Published Mon, Mar 28 2011 2:54 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Health 2.0, Transparency, AHRQ, Michael Painter

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the (EHR) Bomb

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE Remember the fear mongering rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and all sorts of other bogey men that sometimes led to war death and true destruction and other times to just animosity, hatred and counterproductive waste of...

Published Mon, Mar 28 2011 7:07 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: HIT, EHR, THCB, Margalit Gur-Aire

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

By KIMBERLEY MANNING, MD On May 19, 1996, I graduated from medical school. And although I look and seem ridiculously youthful (I know, that’s what you were saying) it’s been–as my patients at Grady like to say–”a mi-nute”...

Published Sun, Mar 27 2011 10:37 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB

Primary Care Workforce Situation: Not Hopeless

By DAVID E. WILLIAMS I sometimes observe that the only sector of the economy as messed up as health care is higher education, where the US has some great institutions but where costs are incredibly high and have been rising relentlessly for long periods...

Published Sat, Mar 26 2011 3:49 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Physicians, David Williams, Primary care physicians