The Health Care Blog

POLICY: Low Payments by U.S. Raise Medical Bills Billions a Year

Freudenheim punked twice in 2 weeks? Apparently so. More in the morning

POLITICS: Bill Frist--A wonderful man and a great doctor who has never done anything worthy of criticism in his life!

There was an puff piece last week in the WaPo called Bill Frist: A Doctor at Heart Contrasted with the gossip-based assassination on fellow 08 candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband in the National Enquirer New York Times, this is...

PHARMA/POLICY/POLITICS: McKinnell's friends turn and bitch-slap him, by The Industry Veteran

The Industry Veteran is back. He notes a piece I’d missed in which the oh-so-rational editorial board of the Wall Street Journal declared Part D to be a future political liability for their desire to drown the government in a...

QUALITY/INDUSTRY: Healthways buys Lifemasters

Over in the disease management world, a little piece of consolidation late yesterday. Healthways is buying Lifemasters for some $307m. Healthways is running at a $400m annual revenue rate and has a $1.75 billion market cap, so that suggests that...

TECH: PACS in 450 words or less!

I have an article up at Health-IT World which is about the evolution of PACS — largely based on a long interview I did recently with Oran Muduroglu, a founder of Stentor which Philips bought last year. I found it...

POLICY/HEALTH PLANS: HDHPs are indeed appearing in big companies

The Detroit Free Press notes that HDHPs are even showing up in the automakers. They’re of course following the lead of a few high tech companies.

BLOGS: Grand Rounds is up

KidneyNotes hosts Grand Rounds

POLICY/INDUSTRY: Money-driven Medicine, a sorta review

I must be getting vaguely famous as I was sent (unsolicited) a copy of a new book by Maggie Mahar called Money-Driven Medicine. On Sunday it was reviewed in the Boston Globe, which fairly accurately portrayed it as an indictment...

HEALTH PLANS/HOSPITALS: United--not in enough trouble, goes looking for more

I don’t know what’s going on at UnitedHealth Group, but I am missing the strategic subtlety of this latest move. If I were trying to manage PR for the biggest and most profitable health plan in the country, and I...

POLIY/HOSPITALS: And if you can believe this...

A post in a policy/politics blog about the nursing shortage with 61 comments! Who knew people got so worked up about this stuff?

TECH: Neal Patterson: Optimist

If you really have nothing better to do over the holiday weekend, take a quick look at where Cerner claim that they’re going to make their money in the future. I’ll be back Tuesday to comment.

PHYSICIANS/PHARMA/POLICY: More Friday fun

I was checking out potential book titles when I cam across this site, Health Care for Dummies. Given that I’ve spent some of the week beating up on the AMA, and spent some of yesterday touching on why the health...

OFF-TOPIC: The most important world news

Iraq? Terrorism? Middle East? Health Care? IT? None of that is in the least importance compared to what the English nation is fixated on. Will Wayne Rooney’s right foot be better in time for the world cup? The answer appears...

TECH/POLICY/BLOGS: from PARC--GUI, Ethernet, the Laser Printer, and now....moi--Talking

Xerox PARC — Silicon Valley’s most famous research center. The place where the HomeBrew Computer club used to meet. The place from which good ideas were “appropriated” and become the core of minor companies like Apple, 3Com and later Microsoft....

TECH/HEALTH PLANS/PHYSICIANS: Let's hire this PR firm!

To those of you who’ve been paying attention, this may not exactly be news. Apparently, health insurers don’t pay claims immediately and deny some of them. But it is news because practice management/billing company AthenaHealth has quantified the numbers across...

POLICY/PHYSICIANS: More on the AMA

So why did I get so grumpy with the secretary of the AMA and his talk at TEPR. I actually stood up and asked a long question which he interrupted to tell a bunch of lies about Canada, ignoring that...

TECH: Iinteroperability, Schminteroperability

I’m up at Health-IT World talking about interoperability. I interviewed the Sun guys and TeraMedica for this brief article, and will have something else on the topic out later this week. I hope that I made it understandable….it’s the kind...

TECH: Phil Sissions on the NHS--Less there than meets the eye

Also at the TEPR Conference, Phil Sissions, who recently left working for the UK’s NHS’ National Program for Information Technology (NPfIT), gave a pretty critical account of the progress to date for the single largest program in health care IT....

PHYSICIANS/TECH: The intransigence of the AMA knows no bounds

Here’s what I wrote for FierceHealthcare today. Attendees at the 22nd annual TEPR meeting could be forgiven for being a little anxious about the future. Conference organizer and Medical Records Institute Peter Waegemann put out a call for action, noting...

BLOGS: Health Wonk Review is up

Up at InsureBlog: The Health Wonk Review (Lucky #7).

TECH: TEPR musings

I’m at TEPR, the electronic patient record conference, in lovely Baltimore Maryland. The line for the $4 latte at Starbucks is way too long, but across the street at Edie’s Deli, two eggs, home fries, scrapple, toast with jam, and...

Policy: The LA Times on Kaiser Permanente By John Irvine

The smoke appears to be clearing around Kaiser Permanente's headquarters, where the management is no doubt wondering if the worst is over after this week's decision to close the HMO's Northern California kidney transplant center. Patients enrolled in the program...

POLICY: Do No Evil, Part II.

Here's my editorial in today's issue of FH. This week saw more controversy regarding some of the bad boys of healthcare past and strong hints that some of the healthcare market stars of the present may have adopted their bad...

HEALTH PLANS/PBMs: Don't be evil?

I’m in Miami to talk to the Blues Association about blogging and new media. I think my theme is that You Shouldn’t Be Evil (or whatever the Googlers say…) But it looks like Caremark is joining United and ACS in...

INTERNATIONAL: The NHS in their own words

The NHS — Life, death and paperwork Sent to me by Michael Millenson — this is fantastic. Short “days in the life” from all over the UK National Health Service. Go read I’d like to do an American version…..

BLOGS: Wefer-wee! Wefer-wee!

Today I’m up at Spot-on writing about a really important topic (none of that health care rubbish…)

HOSPITALS/PHYSICIANS: E-mail leads to doc lawsuit in Jefferson Health System

Dig into this story -- It's a juicy one "E-mail leads to doc lawsuit in Jefferson Health System" Sounds like there's a little war over patient ownership going on...just in case you forgot your hospital econ 101.

QUALITY/CONSUMER/TECH: Health -- On Demand by Pat Salber

Pat Salber writes The Doctor Weighs In, and she has some pretty interesting thoughts about this consumer health schtick. I cross-posted here but go check out her blog too! The Internet has changed the way we do so many of...

THCB: Shhh...go back to sleep

Life will be vey quiet here today while I get some other stuff that’s been stuck in my queue done.

HOSPITALS/TECH: Is the kiddie porn hysteria going too far?

You would expect Children’s Hospital in San Diego to be very, very nervous about anything to do with porn. After all, this is the place where apparently a nurse and a tech roamed free taking pornographic pictures of children, molesting...

TECH/CONSUMERS: It's care delivery that matters most

Here’s my FH editorial today…. This week two very different healthcare conferences rolled through San Francisco. One was about Consumer-Directed Health Care and was a cross between a capitalist land-grab and a political pep rally for HSA-backers and Canada-bashers. There...

POLICY/PHARMA: Cato calls the Republicans on the Part D deceipt

I approve of government programs done well. Michael Cannon doesn’t approve of them done much at all. We both disapprove of them being done expensively and then having so-called Conservatives in power lie bold face about their costs and enrollment...

PHYSICIANS/BLOGS: Disheartened? Maybe

I love people commenting on THCB, and 99% of the comments are very, very thoughtful. But I am a little dismayed that while only one person wants to comment on my long piece on the individual insurance market, one other...

POLICY: talking about the inefficiencies of the insurance market...

A Commonwealth Fund study from HSC in the latest Health Affairs reminds us that employees in small firms pay 18% more for health insurance when adjusted for value of plan adjusted premiums. Here's the full Health Affairs study Meanwhile, to...

PBMs: Is the edifice crumbling--not yet!

Conundrum—It was reported in their most recent 10K that what Medco got in rebates from manufacturers went down, and that really hit profit from that sector of their business in the most recent quarter. But their overall profits went up?...

CONSUMERS/BLOGS: CDHC Conference

Dmitriy did a nice job at his talk at the CDHCC meeting yesterday. You can see his slides here I was the skunk in the room on a couple of panels. I asked a “question” at the payments and financial...

TECH: Portals as health care integration platforms

Here’s a piece I wrote for Health-IT World about portals and content management technology in health care. I learnt some interesting stuff talking to the folks at Vignette and CareFx and hope you will too by reading what I wrote!...

HEALTH PLANS/POLICY: RAND study on the individual market puzzles me a little

Here are my longer comments on the RAND study about Consumer making in the individual insurance market published on the web last week by Health Affairs. Somewhat ironically I was interviewed and fairly extensively quoted in this Olga Pierce UPI...

TECH: CDHCC Conf. Report Esther Dyson on start ups

I’ll be dipping in and out of the CDHCC conference. Yesterday I popped in to remind Esther Dyson that we’d met 10 years ago, but now just know each other via email. (She emailed me during someone else's talk to...

POLICY/POLITICS: THe NFIB and other conservatives who can't do basic math

I’m up discussing that topic at Spot-On. Come back here to comment

TECH: Oops! Hospital loses 5,000 X-rays in hard-drive crash

Ore. hospital loses 5,000 X-rays in hard-drive crash. Apparently 4 out of 5 hard drives failed, and the back-up wasn’t backed up. Still that’s nothing—I lost a whole year of downloaded soccer videos when I knocked over my external hard...

PHYSICIANS/POLICY/POLITICS: Malpractice insurance--much cheaper than 1986

This one will get some “discussion” going. Health Affairs has an article showing that malpractice premiums are much lower as a share of physician practice revenues than they were 20 years ago!

BLOGS: Health Wonk Review May 4 (actually May 8) edition

Health Wonk Review is up at Managed Care Matters. Well done Joe (and I know what a pain running a blog and trying to do actual paid work at the same time is!)

PHARMA/POLICY: Yet more revisionism in Part D

It’s incredible how a couple of bullshit surveys, dishonestly conducted have changed the rhetoric a little on Part D. Now there’s a very odd article about Part D in The LA Times, which has been speaking truth to one power...

HEALTH PLANS/HOSPITALS: Kaiser needs to set up a major external review

Here's the latest LA Times article in the series on an issue for Kaiser Permanente that is clearly not going away: Kaiser Transplant Patients Express Their Fear and Fury And up from the comments from Harvey Frey MD, is the...

POLICY/PHARMA: Tierney on Limbaugh--A Taste of His Own Medicine

Rush Limbaugh, idiotic conservative and drug-addict—who I hear in 1990 on his show saying that drug addicts should be “written off” and lately was attacking medical marijuana users, has according to Tierney been given A Taste of His Own Medicine...

HEALTH PLANS: Kaiser, kidney transplants, (sigh)

This Kaiser kidney transplant thing isn’t getting any better—today they’re setting up an “internal enquiry”. There’s no way that lawsuits and legislative activity won’t result soon. And as Eric Novack chastises me for my favoritism, this is from one of...

BLOGS/PHARMA: The sexy world of drug reps--Have the link now

The Daily Show interviews the totally hot Miss Florida who’s also a drug rep and criticizes Jeffrey Avorn for promoting generics using non-hot nurses and pharmacists. Best bit is when they berate a senior for using generics and taking bread...

OFF-TOPIC: And in today's Bush Adminstration debacle

CIA Director Porter Goss Resigns. Hmm….hookers in the Watergate anyone?

CONUSMERS/INDUSTRY: Consumer health care conference in SF coming up next week

Next week I’ll be at some of the Consumer Directed Health Care Conference in SF. It’s a weird match of the business guys trying to extort the last dollar out of the HDHP/CDHP buzzword before it dies its inevitable death,...