The Health Care Blog

TECH/INDUSTRY/POLICY: Out with the trash

Just some quick Friday cleaning up of stuff I never got to but you should look at. Intuit's Dan Levin on how they're going to fix the mess of medical billing et al. The head of the AMA bitching (with...

POLICY: How dumb is the NY Times?

Like a dog licking an open sore, the NY Times again returns to the "we spend so much on health care because it's worth it" meme in a ridiculous article called The Choice: A Longer Life or More Stuff. (This...

QUALITY/POLICY: Futurist's forecast from Clem Bezold

Clem Bezold from Institute for Alternative Futures (kind of the alternative IFTF) gave an overview of the conference and an optimistic 2016 forecast for the availability of broadband to the home, better knowledge and personalized tools that will work on...

QUALITY/TECH: Intel's Dishman wants a proactive health system

He’s been running the R&D for Intel’s health group, which basically means ethnographic research about over 500 households. They largely focused on using “caring machines” to monitor and support the care of the elderly in home, and the chronically ill....

BLOGS: Starring moi!

Tomorrow I am on two unrelated panels on the same topic! Firs at 8 am PST at Jack Morton Worldwide (PR agency) (at 560 Pacific Ave San Francisco, CA) there is a panel on Engaging Blogs and New Media from...

TECH/QUALITY: More quick hits from Ix conference

Deborah Bell—Runs ovarian cancer listserv and became an in-depth patient Alan Greene, the pediatrician who runs DrGreene.com, and gets 50 million hits a month from 2 million unique users—Money quote for doctors online and off - “You have to get...

TECH: MedEncentive--a "commonsense" P4P program

MedEncentive’s system allows doc and patient to declare their compliance and then agree to let the other patient confirm the compliance. And their study shows that it works. Here’s the press release on the study and here’s the study in...

TECH: More on Tech from Ix

Holly Miller runs Cleveland Clinic’s MyChart. Cleveland Clinic has rolled out Epic EMR to its main campus, all its primary care clinics and about 25% of its affiliated specialists. Also rolling it out to community physicians who admit to its...

POLICY: The Uncertain Future of Public Retiree Health Coverage

Brian Klepper has been warning about this for a while. Public agencies have much better benefits for their employees than their private equivalents. And they don’t account for those future costs. There is a FASB106 moment coming up—it was FASB106...

QUALITY: DM on Medicare Health Support, and a nice award

Next up at the Ix conference, Medicare Health Support got three cheerleaders telling us that they’re doing very, very well (Sandy Foote ex CMS, George Bennet from Health Dialog, Michael Montijo from American Healthways. There;s lots and lots of details...

POLICY/HOSPITALS: UNC relents from going after the house

Jerry Ansley has had a pretty tough time, catching encephalitis, going to the hospital alot, and losing his life savings because whatever level of health insurance he had wasn’t enough. The good news is that after lots of pressure Univ...

TECH: Physicians and patients at the IX conference

I’m getting a little late start this morning, and sat through a few talks without taking decent notes. Suffice it to say that Al Mulley talked about reconciling patient and physician expectations which funnily enough are not always the same....

TECH: Informated physicians

From the latest Harris data—Everybody wants one; nobody’s got one.

TECH: Brief cuts from mini presentations

The conference has a series of little demo sessions which look at new tools for Ix Medseek. Spend the last ten years building web portals and content management systems for hospitals. Their 4 audiences are patients, consumers, employees and providers/physicians....

QUALITY/CONSUMERS: Wallace and some patient advocates

Information Therapy center chair Paul Wallace is from Kaiser Permanente, who quite logically would be interested in Ix. He notes that the medical care cost, and the costs of poor health to employers far exceed the medical cost. (Absenteeism. etc)...

QUALITY/POLICY: Information Therapy conference, the employer coalition view

So as I warned you, I’m at the Information Therapy conference in Park City, Utah. Andrew Webber from National Business Coalition on Health. Tries to come at Information Therapy from the point of view of an employer—but an employer who...

QUALITY: 2006 Information Therapy Conference

The 2006 Information Therapy Conference starts later today in lovely Park City, Utah. I may post a photo or two from my weekend in the lovely southern part of the state, and I’ll be giving more information about what’s going...

INDUSTRY/TECH/POLICY/HOPSPITALS: ID Theft Infects Medical Records

In an LA Times article called ID Theft Infects Medical Records Joseph Menn tells several terrifying stories of people who have had their identities stolen by other people who have used them to get medical care. Not only does this...

PHYSICIANS/PHARMA: The oncologists' chemo junket flies above the radar

You may have heard just a few things on THCB from Greg Pawelski, Matt Quinn, me and others about the oncologist prescribing franchise, and how it might just change physicians’ behavior a tad. Well Greg informs me that last Thursday...

PHYSICIANS/QUALITY: Getting the Cedars-Sinai docs to change behavior

Pretty interesting article from the Freakonomics guys about the large efforts it took to get docs at Cedars Sinai to change a relatively simple behavior with a big impact on patient safety— washing their hands. One gets the impression the...

HEALTH PLANS: Blue Cross cancellation story rumbles on

With an election in less than 2 months, the state is finally wading into the Wellpoint BC cancellation mess. Blue Cross now faces a fine: In the first sanction of its kind, California's top HMO regulator fined Blue Cross on...

TECH: Patient physician email only growing slowly

So says HSC: Only about one in four physicians (24%) reported that e-mail was used in their practice to communicate clinical issues with patients in 2004-05, up from one in five physicians in 2000-01, according to a national study released...

BLOGS: Health Wonk Review--up and kicking

Health Wonk Review is up at the Century Foundation. Their policy expert Leif Wellington Haase holds court and does so very well. Although he didn’t like my use of the work “sucks!”

PHYSICIANS: Dr. Mom sounds off

Angela Heider is no longer practicing as an OBGYN, and has written a book about why not, called The Rise and Fall of Dr. Mom: Women, the Health Care Crisis, and the Future. What went wrong? Well she starts to...

PODCAST/TECH: Jeff Rose, Health Alliant Interview

For those of you who don't want to listen to the podcast, here’s the transcript of my conversation last week with Jeff Rose from Health Alliant. Matthew Holt: So it's Matthew Holt from the Health Care Blog and we are...

PHARMA/POLITICS: When Democrats attack!

When Democrats attack, somehow it doesn’t convey the ferocity of the original series…but with Bush’s approval ratings going up as the price of gas comes down, the Democrats are issuing a Medicare drug report. Yup, they’ve noticed that there is...

HEALTH PLANS: Wellpoint backs down?

Given that Blue Cross of California Unveils Major Initiative to Revise Rescission Policies and Procedures: in order to stop its retroactive cancellations, and that in its very own press release it quotes : William Shernoff, an attorney representing some customers...

TECH/HEALTH PLANS: Quick recap on PHRs and consumer health care

Yesterday I ran a panel at Teradata’s partner conference in MickeyMouseville, FL. On the panel were Liz Dudek from Medstat, Jill Burrington-Brown from AHIMA and David Cochran from Harvard Pilgrim health plan. Pretty interesting conversation. David is particularly fun and...

HEALTH PLANS: More of the same bad behavior?

This article, Sick but Insured? Think Again by Lisa Girion at the Los Angeles Times is why she’s been slow to respond to my email about the AHIP quote from last week. No matter. It’s the same meme about California...

HEALTH PLANS/PBMs: Employers are dumb and therefore get punked

I couldn’t write about this yesterday because I spent the day hanging out in airports, but plenty of people emailed me about Barbara Martinez of the WSJ and her continued journey into the seemy side of employer benefits. As I’ve...

HEALTH PLANS: Is medical cost trend headed down again?

Aetna seems to think so. Last week Aetna shares rose after comments on medical costs. Of course this could be a blip given that last quarter the stock fell on a higher than expected medical loss ratio. But assuming that...

TECH: Search engines revving up--Healia review

Got a press briefing from Healia, which is a new search engine focusing on health care. Their goals is to improve the quality and personalization level of the search, and cut out the spam results. The approach is well thought...

QUALITY/HOSPITALS: Odd hospital stay ratings--only the good get mentioned?

In a vox populi column the SF Chronicle asked readers, How would you rate your last hospital stay? Funnily enough in every case when they had a good experience they mentioned the name of the hospital. If they had a...

HEALTH PLANS: The individual insurance market sucks; did I just catch AHIP in yet another lie?

You’re not exactly surprised are you? A Commonwealth Fund Study Says Individual Insurance Too Costly The overwhelming majority — 89% — of working-age adults who shopped for health coverage in the individual market over the last three years were rejected...

PHYSICIANS: Venting about the AMA, just a bit

I'm up at Spot-on trying to put the AMA's current push polling in perspective. Don't expect me to be too nice. Cruel, but fair.

PODCAST: Jeff Rose on the reality of RHIOs

Yet another excuse to see if you believe in RHIOs. Here's an interview with Jeff Rose who runs Health Alliant, probably the only consulting company focusing exclusively on RHIOs--which he views as a partial solution to health care's market failure....

BLOGS/TECH: Johnmar on Social Media

Fard Johnmar has a new and free eBook out on Social Media. I haven’t read this one, but Fard did a pretty nice review of health care blogging a while back, even if he charged something like $3,750 less for...

HOSPITALS/POLICY: Another hospital CEO calls for single payer

I put this up because you guys love this type of thing as an open thread. Albany Medical Center chief calls for hospital reform and single-payer system. Albany Med Center is a monopoly non-profit provider, so it’ll do fine under...

TECH: Williams not impressed by Bush

David Williams at The Health Business Blog tries vainly to interpret Mr. Bush. No not that Bush, Jonathan Bush from AthenaHealth. But it’s clear that Jonathan shares similar skill with the English language as his more famous cousin. If you...

PHARMA: Peter Rost's confessions of a healthcare hitman

So the book that Rost has been working on is out. (Here’s a very quick summary of his story I wrote back in March). It's called The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman. In contrast to John Mack’s review which...

TECH: More on docs converting to an EMR

From The Blog That Ate Manhattan a really interesting post about the practiacilities of Converting to an Electronic Medical Record: Advice (and Cookies) From a Doc Who's Been There.

HEALTH PLANS: Wellpoint/Anthem branding mystery

Tom Leith is perplexed about the nation's largest health plan’s branding strategy: Have you noticed Anthem is re-branding some/most/all of its Wellpoint operations as "Anthem"? Look at all the "Anthem BCBSs" you see popping up. Is it because Wellpoint destroyed...

PHARMA/HEALTH PLANS: Responding to propaganda with idiot propaganda

Michael Moore dissects U.S. health care. So the first excerpts of "Sicko" have been shown, and the spin from the industry is already quite remarkable. We can't control what a major Hollywood entertainer does," said Mohit Ghose, a spokesman for...

BLOGS: Book reviews and new sponsor

For those of you who may have missed it because it was posted in a slow week before Labor day—here’s a link to my review of two books Winners Take All - The 9 Fundamental Rules of High Tech Strategy...

BLOGS: Spot-On & 9/11

The political site I write for, Spot-on, has a series of short personal essays from all of its writers including me on our thoughts — five years post September 11, 2001

PHARMA: Rost loses, or wins?

There’s an amazing place in the world called the Chinese War Memorial. It’s in Taiwan, and it recounts the tale of the Chinese Civil war from the nationalists side, ending with the glorious retreat to the Republic of China, while...

POLITICS: McLellan--a man too soon?

The NY Times calls McLellan’s resignation the Departure of a Pragmatist. The basic problem was that his “reign” at FDA will be remembered for the pained look on his face when he was forced to defend the ban on reimportation...

POLICY/BLOGS: Comments, and debate right here on THCB

It’s Friday, it’s still the late summer, and people are drifting back to work…few comments on any of the posts. But wait! On one tiny post here on THCB, debate and comment fever has broken out with over 65 back...

TECH: Data storage--what to do for home office use?

The NY Times tells us that we shouldn’t keep all our data in one stash. They’re right. I have everything important at least in two places, but it’s still a struggle to manage. You can buy online back up, but...

HOPSITALS/CONSUMERS: Perhaps this is the future of "body attachements"

A couple of years back there was some bad publicity about a hospital in Illinois that had its debtors hauled off to jail. Perhaps they should instead have tried this solution from Burundi—Don’t let them out if they can’t pay!