The Health Care Blog

TECHNOLOGY: Problems for medical groups working with WebMD

In an article yesterday Modern Physician reports that several medical groups are having technical problems submitting claims via WebMD. Given that WebMD took over several claims clearing houses and transaction systems in its roll-up phase in 1999-2001, the complaint from...

INDUSTRY/QUALITY: Better Health Technologies DSM e-Newsletter

Just in case you haven't seen it before take a look at the e-Newsletter from Better Health Technologies. It's written by a smart veteran of the DSM wars, Vince Kuraitis, and this month's has a particularly fine analysis of recent...

PHARMA/PHYSICIANS: The oncologists dilemma, by Matt Quinn

Regular contributor Matt Quinn who used to work in this obscure part of the health care business, reminded me of the Medicare Bill's provisions to reduce the ability of oncologists to make money off the drugs they dispense: The proverbial...

PHARMA: Love the sin, hate the sinner?

The latest Harris Interactive/WSJ poll compares various ratings of the trust of the public in institutions and professions "to do the right thing" versus their trust in specific people, products and companies "to do the right thing for you". They...

POLICY/INDUSTRY: The value of health care--interesting issue, but appalling analysis

An interesting report was issued yesterday with loads of fanfare by The Value Group. The actual study was done by Medtap, a technology assessment shop for the pharma industry, which was spun out of the Battelle Institute (a kind of...

TECHNOLOGY: We're all agreed about motherhood and apple pie

Information Week (via iHealthbeat) reports on the World Health Congress in which lots of important political people agreed that IT is the way forward to fix the health care mess. Those saying this included not just the usual suspects from...

POLICY: Health care becomes like foreign policy

You might note that today in the UK the Hutton report on the Blair government, Iraq and "sexing up" was released. More on that later (although it exonerates the UK government from the "sexing up" allegation). Over at The Businessword...

POLICY: California docs ambivalent about SB2

The poor CMA apparently can't get it right. It finally gets a quasi-universal insurance bill passed in California that should reduce the number of uninsured showing up at the doctor's office and yet a bunch of its members (like the...

PHARMA: Sanofi Bids 48 Billion Euros for Aventis

Just worth noting that another round of consolidation in big pharma is underway asSanofi Bids 48 Billion Euros for Aventis. While this is an all French deal, as if you hadn't noticed by now, pharma companies make all their money...

INDUSTRY: Tenet in trouble again

Just in case you thought I'd forgotten the US, I'd like to remind you that the story here remains the same. Bush is calling for tax credits to cure insurance and Tenet is being investigated. I'm back in the US...

PHARMA: Price controls and foreign imports--European style

Although drug prices are generally set by the government in Europe, there is significant price variation between different countries. Savvy European entrepreneurs have therefore gone to wholesalers in the cheapers countries (like Greece) and imported drugs to be resold to...

POLICY: France faces health budget crunch

Just to follow up on the news from the UK last week, there's a report out from the French government suggesting that they might both charge more for prescriptions and increase the payroll tax that supports health care. The government's...

TECHNOLOGY: Pew reports on wired Californians

(...and I don't mean because of too many espressos) Pew reports that poorer Californians use the Internet at high rates. For households with less than $30,000 in annual income 45% of Californians have Internet access versus 36% nationally, and of...

QUALITY QUICKIE: Letter from England, (with UPDATE Tues)

UPDATE: Don Johnson and I are having a friendly spat about the real cost of health care in Europe and another about the uninsured in the new comments section of The Business Word. I hope that Don keeps support for...

TECHNOLOGY: IT for EBM

Occasional contributor Matt Quinn has been on a tear this week. He notes the following gem from a recent iHealthbeat story about the use of IT in evidence based medicine. According to Dr. Bob Williams, principal of Cap Gemini Ernst...

INDUSTRY: Healthsouth soap opera reaches ridiculous stage

And just when you thought the Healthsouth mess couldnt get any more bizarre, the new management have decided that the fraud was worse than they were letting on, $4Bn rather than $2.5Bn. One "victim" is ex-child actor, star of the...

PBMs: More litigation attacks on PBM behavior, leads to longer term doubts.

I've reported before on the suits against Caremark and Medco for all kinds of alleged shenanigans in drug pricing, rebates and other activities kept away from their clients' eyes. There's a bumper crop of news this week about the same...

POLICY: Notes from my wonderings on Medicare

In New York last week I had a great visit with my old colleagues at Harris. Humphrey Taylor had some new data showing that flu vaccinations don't seem to work. Meanwhile Bob Leitman broadly agreed with me that we can't...

PHYSICIANS/INDUSTRY: Notes from my wanderings on EBM and malpractice

Apologies for the lack of posting. When you read the first paragraph you'll figure out why. I've been touring around the East Coast talking to various people in the health care business and then on Thursday went to the UK....

NOTE: Lite today

I'm travelling today and tomorrow. There may be something wonderful written on the plane, there may be not. So please check on Friday but don't hold it against me if you don't see anything till Monday. Thanks. Matthew

TECHNOLOGY: Jane Sarasohn Kahn's top ehealth predictions for 2004

Jane Sarasohn Kahn has her top ten predictions for eHealth 2004 out at iHealthbeat. Considering that I'll be her house guest tonight I've been remiss in not referring you to it! So go read.

POLICY: 1991 redux? NY Times discovers health care crisis, Democrats response to it

Apparently there's a health care crisis going on. 43 odd million uninsured, (that's at any one time--25 million basically permanently 80 million for some substantial time in any 4 year period), costs going through the roof (premiums up 8% over...

PHARMA/POLICY: New word for the day

Just a quick post as I'm traveling all day today. Yesterday I heard a new Medicare term to do with NAIM ("New and Improved Medicare"). The word is TROOP, which stands for "True Out of Pocket"costs. Those are the costs...

INDUSTRY: Malpractice & EBM, a modest proposal from Matt Quinn

Over at DB's Medical Rants and at the Bloviator there's been a continued interesting debate on Malpractice. I suggest that you read DB's post here, which as a bonus gets you two long comments from Ross (who writes the Bloviator)....

PHARMA: Potential blockbuster drugs to watch in '04

CBS marketwatch has an interesting list of new blockbuster drugs to watch for in '04. One of the blockbusters is Caduet, an interesting combo pill from Pfizer that combines Novarsc and Lipitor for both hypertension and high cholesterol. This helps...

PHARMA: Big pharma gets aggressive over pricing

Two of my favorite contributors both have found me interesting stories about pharma company tactics today. Jane Sarasohn Kahn sent me an article about the ongoing US-Australia talks on drug pricing. Recall that the Aussies joined us in invading Iraq...

QUALIITY: Says here that Doctors read the news!

Over at DB's Medical Rants Robert has responded to my gentle chiding and has written a nice piece regarding what's wrong (in his view) with Wampum's piece on malpractice. (Note that he got up at 4 am to write it...

PHARMA: GSK says to contest $5.2 billion U.S. tax claim

Just in case you thought you had tax troubles, the IRS thinks that GlaxoSmithKline owes it $5.2 billion. GSK has about $2bn in reserves to pay this, but obviously will be in tax court for a few years whittling this...

QUALITY: IOM meeting focuses on asthma, other key areas while Berwick puts it to the sword

The IOM just held a two day meeting to follow up on the 2001 report on Crossing the Chasm, which focused on the quality of chronic care management. This meeting focused on how to make real improvements in the areas...

QUALITY: More on malpractice

Stephen Schoenbaum and Randall Bobjerg, from the Commonwealth Fund and the Urban Institute respectively, probably just got themselves crossed off the AMA's Christmas card list by publishing this article in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They suggest that doctors are...

INDUSTRY: Boutique medicine emerges as an on & off-line niche. Will it be turbocharged by HSAs?

I'm preparing a speech I'm giving next week and I've gone back to some of my old charts which essentially said that over time Americans would have less time and more money to deal with our health care (and lives...

INDUSTRY: Malpractice at Wampum, with UPDATE

An interesting little storm is brewing over at Wampum about malpractice and its role in the latest Tort reform issue. There's a lot of lefty and righty rhetoric in the comments, and I stuck my 2 cents in about the...

QUALITY: Appendix surgery, too often needless but inevitably so?

I am determined to get back to the conversation on evidence based medicine that I was having with Robert Cantor over at Medical Rants before the holidays. Sadly I'm too gummed up with other work to finish the thoughtful response...

HEALTH PLANS: Goldman analyst reads THCB, BusinessWord

OK the headline is bogus, but sometimes I should believe myself. Not too long ago I posted about health insurance and in the middle of that post I wrote this: How do health plans make their money?. .....it helps if...

TECHNOLOGY: CSC, Accenture Win Regional Pacts for NHS System

The remaining contracts in the UK's NHS Care Record Service are being awarded. The latest contracts are for the east and northwest regions and the big winners are CSC and Accenture. These are huge contracts of over $1.6bn each. In...

PHARMA: Drug stocks low risk in the new year?

The AP reported on New Year's Eve that the rough consensus of analysts is that 2004 will be a reasonable but not great year for the pharma stocks. Those stocks have of course underperformed the S&P over the last year...

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Welcome to 2004 at THCB. I hope to do a revamp to the site in the next few weeks, but I don't think you'll see too much change to the way things are run. I don't think I'll be adding...