March 2011 - The Health Care Blog

Freeing the Data

By JOHN HALAMKA, MD I’m keynoting this year’s Intersystems Global Conference on the topic of “Freeing the Data” from the transactional systems we use today such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management...

Published Wed, Mar 02 2011 5:28 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: EHR, HITECH, Health 2.0, Meaningful Use, John Halamka, Tech, ERP, Data, CRM

The Neverending Story

By STEVE SANDERS We’re hearing a lot about the use of electronic medical records (EMR) in medicine. The government is all for it—providing financial incentives for those with EMRs and disincentives for those still relying on paper charts to make their...

Published Sat, Mar 26 2011 9:14 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Patients, Data, Design

Realizing Value from Health IT: A BCG Response to the PCAST report

By BENJAMIN BERK, MD, SIMON KENNEDY, & BCG HCIT Team If we are to achieve the aims of health insurance reform/PPACA, let alone eventual health delivery reform, the US needs coherent, comprehensive federal health IT policy. In late December, PCAST...

Published Fri, Mar 04 2011 8:54 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: HIT, Front Page, BCG, PCAST

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

The CMIO Should Be a Doctor

By MAGGIE MAHAR A hospital’s Chief Medical Information Office (CMIO) should be a physician, says Pam Brier, president and CEO of Maimonides Medical Center, “because nobody knows a doctor’s business like a doctor.” As a hospital’s information technology...

Published Tue, Mar 22 2011 7:56 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: HIT, THCB, Maggie Mahar, CIO, CMIO

Doctors Love iPads. What Does it Mean? What Does it Mean?

By VINCE KURAITIS After attending HIMSS 11 the largest annual health IT conference of the year, John Moore reported that “nearly every EHR vendor has an iPad App for the EHR [electronic health record], or will be releasing such this year.” Doctors love...

Published Sun, Mar 06 2011 7:14 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Health 2.0, Vince Kuraitis, iPad

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

Time For the Wisdom of the Crowd

By PAUL LEVY On the post below, “nonlocal MD,” a regular contributor, asks: I would next like to see a series on how you think all this could be done better, perhaps drawing on your international experiences. And Barry Carol says: As I understand...

Published Thu, Mar 03 2011 11:15 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Patients, Paul Levy, Europe, Front Page, Healthcare systems, United States

The insanity of health care pricing, aka Alice in Medical Land

By DAVID E. WILLIAMS One of the interesting things I learned in business school is that not only is it typical for a business to earn 80 percent of its profits from 20 percent of its customers, but that 75 percent of its customers may represent 120 percent...

Published Tue, Mar 01 2011 10:07 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Medicare, David Williams, Healthcare costs, Superhealthanomics, Capitation

Nurses: Protocol -ed to Extinction?

By SARAH BETH COWHERD If you have been at your nursing job for a while, you’ve probably almost forgotten. Forgotten what it was like to come in to the healthcare system you now work for and realize there are hundreds of new protocols for you to learn...

Published Tue, Mar 08 2011 6:11 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Nursing, Nurses, Protocols, Sarah Beth Cowherd

The Promise of Stem Cell Research: Recent Advancements and Setbacks

By JOE McWILIAMS Few technologies spark as much fascination, hype, and controversy as stem cell technology. One of the most interesting medical applications of stem cell research is in regenerative medicine, where stem cells are being developed to regenerate...

Published Thu, Mar 17 2011 3:24 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB

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

The Value a Life

By BENJAMIN GEISLER A recent NYTimes article on how to value a life drew almost two-hundred heavy-handed comments. It discussed how different governmental agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA...

Published Thu, Mar 03 2011 11:41 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Front Page

Who Owns Patient Data?

By DAVID HARLOW Walgreens is being sued by customers who are not happy that their prescription information – even though it has been de-identified – is being sold by Walgreens to data-mining companies. The data privacy and security concerns surrounding...

Published Tue, Mar 22 2011 7:02 AM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: THCB, Privacy, David Harlow, Patient data, Walgreens

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