The Health Care Blog

Pilots Use Checklists. Doctors Don't. Why Not? By Maggie Mahar

Frequent THCB contributor Maggie Mahar returns today with another of her no-holds barred pieces on the practice of medicine, examining the the controversey over checklists for doctors. Many physicians are opposed to the idea on general principles, arguing that checklists...

Look at How Safe [Fill in the Blank] Is by Bob Wachter

But is it as simple as that really? Perhaps not. In the commentary that follows, Bob Wachter has a very different take on the airline analogy. Analogies are useful things, true, he argues. But perhaps not as useful as the...

BLOGS: Out Lindsaying Lohan

And in your Friday irrelevancy…. I love those “Top 10 most emailed or read” lists and I’m hoping that Typepad will one day let me get one on THCB. Until today the most ever I saw was 3 of the...

California not really uber alles

Late last week Brian Klepper stirred things up around here calling California's health care bill Business As Usual. Over at Spot-on earlier this week I was a little more simplistic. I call the California approach The Last of the Old...

Health 2.0 San Diego Spring Fling Agenda

So for Christmas we're announcing our first cut of the agenda for our next Health 2.0 conference, to be held at the Westin San Diego on March 3rd-4th. Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare in San Francisco sold out a month before...

My Nomination For Health Care Quote of the Year - Brian Klepper

I was reading through other peoples’ blog posts yesterday when amazingly enough, I was here on THCB and came across this straightforward statement by Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Of course, many readers...

Tiny Tim Health Care By Michael L. Millenson

Every year at this time, millions of Americans turn their attention to a much-beloved story about health care reform. I refer, of course, to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. While this is not the traditional plot summary, it aptly describes...

Business As Usual: California's Reform Proposal - Brian Klepper

In the world of health reform wonks - the writers on this blog qualify in spades - all eyes are on California at the moment. His Republicanism notwithstanding, Governor Schwartzenegger has developed a generous $14 billion bill that would extend...

Seeking Sustainable RHIO Forest; View Obscured by Non-profit Trees by Martin Jensen

Health Affairs just published a study by a team of Harvard researchers that has cast a pall on the sustainability of Regional Health Information Organizations (also referred to as Health Information Exchanges). The report, The State Of Regional Health Information...

Say it Ain't So, Joe by Paul Levy

I heard a great presentation this morning by Joe Newhouse, from the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard Medical School. There was one point that he made that really caught my attention. It was a cite to a...

HEALTH 2.0 UPDATE

If you missed Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare this September you are now officially in luck. The 4 DVD box set of conference highlights is now available for purchase. And just in time for Christmas! Starring Dr. David Brailer, Sermo's Daniel...

POLICY: Overtreated gets huge plaudit

OK. It’s official. David Leonhardt is a convert, even one who can’t quite leave his past behind. In is NY Times selection for Economics book of the year he picks Shannon Brownlee’s Overtreated. (If you want to hear me and...

POLICY/QUALITY: Uninsurance does indeed kill you quicker

I'm not going to go into the whys and wherefores of what's wrong with cancer care in this country. But when the IOM said that people die early because of uninsurance, people scoffed. The same people (and you know who...

TECH: UPDATE The British & Germans are coming.....to Disease Mangement?

Health Dialog sold itself to partial investor BUPA, a British insurance company, today. The price tag valued Health Dialog at $775m However, this may not be the only European incursion into DM this week. Rumor has it that The Health...

THCB is proudly sponsored by CDW Healthcare

POLICY: As Goes California, So Should Go the Nation, by Mary Kay Henry

Now I can’t claim to be an optimist about the future of California's health reform bill. But at least someone is. And that someone is SEIU Executive Vice President Mary Kay Henry. Here’s her take on the latest California news...

THCB Sponsor Shout out

A quick reminder that THCB would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. We'd like to give a shout out to CDW-Healthcare, who were the first gold sponsor to sign on this year. If you haven't been...

Policy- vs. Market-Based Reform: RHIOs as a Case Study - Brian Klepper

As Anonymouse insightfully commented, the Harvard team's RHIO study in Health Affairs is very telling about the barriers facing do-gooder health care projects. That said, I wanted to add two comments. First, while RHIOs are unquestionably good public policy, what...

BLOGS: Diabetes Year in Review

Our friend and colleague Amy Tenderich has a just excellent Diabetes Year in Review up at DiabetesMine. It covers Health 2.0 (of course) but also drugs devices, design, and the growth of people with diabetes as a social force. Amy...

TECH: RHIO, RHIO, ree-ay-yo,by anonymouse

OK, the title is a take off on the Police song, but the subject has got a little more influence lately. A sometime THCB correspondent had these thoughts: The December 11 edition of Health Affairs contains a very important article...

TECH: Shout-out for Phil Chuang

One of my favorite ex-colleagues Phil Chuang got a nice bit of recognition last week being named as one of the ComputerWorld Top 100 CIOs for 2008. Note that this isn’t just health care CIOs, it’s among all CIOs! Also...

JOB POST: Physician Advocate: Siemens Medical Solutions

Specific requirements: Medical Degree (MD) . Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills along with strong analytical skills required. Ability to travel 70%. Demonstrates assigned products to prospective or existing clients in sales situations which include demo system operations in conjunction...

JOB POST: Director of Medicare and Medicaid Markets

Silverlink Communications, Inc. December, 2007 Summary of duties and responsibilities: Information availability and communications effectiveness are among the top drivers of member satisfaction with health plans. Providing members with the right healthcare decision-support and self-management information and tools at the...

HEALTH PLANS: Populist Republican attacks sweet, innocent non-profit

Blue Shield of California, the cuddly non-profit, is going to the mat with the state over recissions. Essentially Shield is saying, “It was fraud, so the recissions are legal.” Everyone else has settled. This has mightly pissed off California insurance...

Bad Medicine: How The AMA Undermined Primary Care in America - Brian Klepper

On Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal website, Dr. Benjamin Brewer describes physicians’ reactions to the 10.1% cut in Medicare physician payments that will take effect January 1. He argues that the onus will fall, once again, disproportionately on primary care physicians,...

Health IT breakthrough possible in Washington by Eric Novack

Unnamed senior officials at CMS confidentially report that serious bipartisan discussions are ongoing to help get the Health IT bill completed. “Electronic medical records and e-prescribing, if mandated throughout the country, would save thousands of American lives each year”, one...

HEALTH 2.0 UPDATE

Meanwhile, if you've been thinking about signing up for a pass to the next Health 2.0 conference you have until midnight today to qualify for our early bird rates. Health 2.0 Connecting Consumers and Providers will be held March 3-4...

POLICY: Try and reconcile these two basic statements

The National Federation of Independent Business, which says it has 350,000 members with active lobbyists in 50 states, warned politicians and policy makers on Wednesday not to impose new health-benefit obligations on small employers. The group said in a statement...

PHYSICIANS: Morrison on The Doctor Conundrum

Non-plagiarist* whatever anyone says, Ian Morrison has a great article called The Doctor Conundrum, suggesting that doctors are cranky again. Essentially Ian says it's not that we're paying doctors too much--it's that they'd make more as salesmen or futurists. *This...

BLOGS: HealthBlawg's Health Wonk Review--December 2007

Just a cracking HWR from David Harlow at HealthBlawg. And you thought those lawyers were all dull and had no imagination. I guess legal Boston is proving us all wrong in more ways than one.

Health 2.0 Casting Call

We are excited to announce a new panel format at our Spring conference, "Connecting Consumers and Providers" in San Diego on March 3-4, 2008. In addition to spotlighting demos and reactions from industry experts, we will be capturing the user-experience...

HEALTH 2.0 Media Scan

Modern Healthcare looked at the Health 2.0 movement yesterday in the first of a two part series on Web 2.0 tools. Meanwhile, in a sure sign that something-is-going-on-even-if-nobody-really-agrees-on-exactly-what-it-is, Ben Toth, the former director of the NHS National Knowledge Service says...

POLICY: Trading Places was right!

Every so often I read an article that (I hope) confirms what we know is right. Remember “Trading Places”? Dan Akroyd is stripped of his upper-class environment and fails. Eddy Murphy is plucked form the gutter and succeeds, and the...

HEALTH 2.0: Industry heavyweights meet in San Diego

This meeting held by the Markle Foundation near San Diego over two days last week may turn out to be the most important health information and technology policy meeting of the past 5 years. So I'll try to choose my...

JOB POST: Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida

Become part of a progressive Medical Informatics team! We are redeveloping our analytic infrastructure and are looking for high caliber individuals who think BIG, and think outside the box to enable our business to take care of our customers. Our...

HEALTH PLANS: Bill McGuire--off the hook?

Bill McGuire Friday tried to put the options scandal behind him. Don’t forget that he did (at least) two very questionable things before the scandal came to light. First he formally abandoned utilization review at United in 2001. That to...

POLITICS: Cohn on Obama; me on Cutler

Jon Cohn’s TNR piece Mandate Overboard goes (in somewhat grueling detail) into a defense his estimate that a mandateless universal insurance plan will leave a substantial number uninsured. I’ll say it more simply. Voluntary universal health insurance is a Harvard...

HEALTH 2.0: Creating a Universal Individual Healthcare Identifier By Barry Hieb

For many years it has been widely acknowledged that there are many benefits which could be realized by healthcare through the creation of a system of unique individual healthcare identifiers. These identifiers could enable the creation of a comprehensive medical...

POLITICS: President Obama's Health care head fake

So unlike Paul Krugman who's just being critical of Obama's lack of a mandate, over at Spot-on I think I see the political brilliance behind it--or am I just deluding myself? Come back here to comment of course: It’s a...

UnitedHealth Customers Speak With their Feet, and it’s Time for Everyone to Listen by Miriam Bookey

This week’s sobering news from UnitedHealth serves as a wake-up call to anyone in healthcare services. For better or worse, a consumer-driven health economy has put individual consumers in the driver’s seat when it comes to how, when and with...

Annals of Journalism

"With the holidays and being taken hostage, they are likely off the stress chart." -- Rochester psychologist Anita Remig, reflecting on the likely current psychological state of the six Clinton campaign workers taken hostage last Friday in New Hampshire by...

The Pipeline: Vaccines v.s. Antibiotics by Dov Michaeli

In 1796 Dr. Edward Jenner performed an experiment that today would have got him expelled from his Medical Society, and maybe even landed them in jail. He vaccinated a boy against smallpox by pricking his arms with pus taken from...

Rating Doctors Like Restaurants, by Bob Wachter

Robert Wachter is widely regarded as a leading figure in the modern patient safety movement. Together with Dr. Lee Goldman, he coined the term "hospitalist" in an influential 1996 essay in The New England Journal of Medicine. His most recent...

POLITICS: Jonathan Cohn confesses on the Obama 15 million problem

Apparently the 15m uninsured in Obama's plan are all Jonathan Cohn's fault. At least the picking up on that number by Hillary and Edwards in the debates, that is. I’m still struggling with how Obama is correctly to the left...

POLICY: The Proper ASD Policy Begins with Listening to Parents, By John Whitmer

On November 24, 2007 Senator Clinton announced her "Plan to Help Children and Families Affected by Autism." While the Senator should be commended for finally paying attention to the issue in her presidential campaign and while other candidates should take...

POLICY: What next in the fight against AIDS?

Susan Blumenthal updates us on World Aids Day which was last Saturday.

PODCAST: Overtreated, Shannon Brownlee explains all

I am so so far behind getting my transcripts of podcasts up here that it’s not funny. But this was one of the most recent and one of the most fun that I’ve ever done. It was a discussion with...