The Health Care Blog

Ratings games

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Most Americans believe there are fair and reliable ways to gauge the quality of health care. 9 in 10 Americans are interested in their health plans having a website where you could rate doctors on issues like...

Which way to go for health reform? From Birkenstocks to pom-poms

By Sarah Arnquist The methods proposed to clean up the health care mess in the United States that leading voices pitched to hundreds of journalists Friday unsurprisingly were as varied as their Birkenstocks and patriotic tie. David Himmelstein, co-founder of...

Medicare releases hospital patient satisfaction data

By Sarah Arnquist Before choosing a hospital for an elective procedure, patients can now use the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Hospital Compare Web Site to see how former patients rated their experiences at various hospitals. Patients can compare...

Dennis Quaid takes on hospital errors

By Sarah Arnquist Hospital patient safety has a new celebrity advocate in Dennis Quaid, whose twin newborns received a massive overdose of a blood thinner last year at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center while being treated for infections. While his twins bled...

Rebuilding The Medical Home: What Walgreens Surely Sees

By Brian Klepper Though it probably went mostly unnoticed in the cacophony of health care stories, last week's news that Walgreen's had bought the two largest and most well-established worksite clinic firms, iTrax and Whole Health Management, was a harbinger...

Happy Birthday, Viagra!

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn It's the drug that raised the profile of medicine in popular culture. It's been hawked by a prominent politician and has been the butt of jokes on late-night TV. It's Viagara, and it's turning 10 today. The...

THCB readers will not be surprised ...

By Eric Novack Cancer patients covered only by Medicare face problems getting chemotherapy ... Massachusetts Health Plan underfunded

Average Time of Discharge: Why a Hospital is Not a Hilton

By Robert Wachter Do you get as annoyed as I do about being pressured on your “Time of Discharge?” I just received my monthly report, and we’re in The Doghouse again: our average TOD – 3:28 pm – is hours...

Prosecution in organ harvest case faces hurdles at trial

By Sarah Arnquist Although neither the prosecution nor defense has shown its entire case, the unusually long eight-day preliminary hearing for transplant surgeon Hootan Roozrokh revealed considerable details about what happened during Ruben Navarro’s final hours and the hurdles both...

Entering Unfamiliar Territory

By Kristen Trusko If universal coverage mandates that employers provide health insurance or that people secure it themselves, it is highly likely that the majority will choose the lowest cost option, or “low premium” (aka HDHP or high deductible health...

Criminal charges filed against transplant surgeon

By Sarah Arnquist Prosecutors in a small town on California’s Central Coast are making history. For the first time in the United States, they brought criminal charges against a transplant surgeon, alleging he prescribed excessive amounts of medication in an...

A Detailed Analysis of Barack Obama's Health Care Reform Plan

Thanks to a very high Google ranking this has been the most popular ever post on THCB. And it's an excellent analysis by Robert Laszewski. who writes The Health Policy and Marketplace Blog. However, it was written during the Democratic...

A Doctor Grows in Brooklyn

By THCB staff Doctor Jay Parkinson became a media celebrity last year as word spread about his unconventional practice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Instead of maintaining a traditional office and paying support staff, Parkinson’s operation is entirely virtual and requires almost...

Health 2.0: Weighing In With a Reality Check

By Michael Millenson Maybe you saw the article: “Health 2.0 Helps, But Personal Contact Remains Top Weight Loss Strategy.” OK. I made up the headline. But the information comes from an article that provides food for thought for those of...

Mother-Power Online

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn 4 in 5 moms go online at least once a month, according to My Mommy's Online. The report is based on 2007 data from Simmons Consumer Research Survey published by eMarketer. "Being a parent makes going online...

Lessons From a Sad Error

By Paul Levy I think many people have seen this sad story of a wrong-sided kidney removal in Minnesota. We all feel the pain for this poor patient. It is difficult for us non-physicians to understand how this happens, for...

A Different Right to Privacy

By Eric Novack Given Matthew's quite visceral response to some complaints that broad-based, government-encouraged (mandated, I suspect), electronic medical records I am interested in both his and THCB readers' thoughts on the Bangor Daily News editorial staff's approach to health...

Nobody Told Me There Would Be Days Like This

Shiri Sandler was diagnosed with RSD, (Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome), after surgery on a broken bone in her foot at the age of 20. Years later she faces severe chronic pain that has spread throughout her...

A Second Life on Second Life

In real life Alice Kreuger has severe multiple sclerosis and is unable to walk without the use of crutches. She rarely leaves her home except for trips to see her doctor. In the virtual world of Second Life she leads...

Loving Our Children

By Brian Klepper Among its many less-noticed accomplishments, this Administration has strangled funding for comprehensive sex education. Instead, it has thrown the immense weight of the US government behind abstinence-based education, an impractical ideological approach rooted in religious zealotry and...

An overdue change....THCB goes group

I've been writing THCB since 2003 and those first few years were great fun, if a little lonely. Back then I was a dotcom refugee getting to grips with the American health care experience after a year or so away....

The Myth of Health Care Consumerism

By Brian Klepper Last weekend I heard several great presentations at a meeting convened by Jeff Goldsmith, but one contained a point I hadn't heard nailed down before. Kaveh Safavi MD JD, from Thomson Healthcare's Center for Healthcare Improvement, detailed...

HEALTH 2.0: Getting the PHR, Privacy and Deborah Peel issue off my chest

By Matthew Holt I’m a card carrying member of the ACLU. I oppose the Patriot Act. And I absolutely oppose the current Administration's decision to ignore the FISA law that already bends over backwards to help the government spy on...

HEALTH 2.0: Healthline personalizes Aetna (and more)

By Matthew Holt Healthline Networks is pursuing a really interesting strategy as it attempts to "dance with the elephants" in vertical search in health care. Today, it's announcing a number of new partnerships and perhaps most interestingly a deal with...

HEALTH PLANS: Time to cut a deal?

By Matthew Holt There's carnage amongst health insurer stocks on Wall Street this morning. For a long while I've been saying that the health insurer party was too good to last and in the past year things have certainly cooled...

Health 2.0: The Long Tail of Healthcare

By Scott Shreeve Long Tail: New business phenomenon in which low distribution and storage cost enable significant profits to be realized by selling small volumes of niche items instead of large numbers of popular items. The potential for online retailers...

Monday Freedom Watch

By Eric Novack From Canada: “Liberty - hostage to medicare” “The Ontario Superior Court on Thursday rejected a Sikh man's claim to a religious-freedom exemption from the province's law on mandatory motorcycle helmets. Supporters of safety as the holiest of...

HEALTH PLANS: Three Inconvenient Truths: The Future of Health Plans in a Connected World

By Matthew Holt In the same vein as Wyden’s speech to AHIP yesterday, this is the talk I gave to the Western Regional Conference (a group of Blues plans) on October 14, 2007. Hello my name is Matthew Holt and...

HEALTH PLANS: Ron Wyden on Health plans

By Matthew Holt Just for Friday, no Health 2.0 stuff. Instead two speeches, one by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (D) last week to AHIP. The other from me to the Western Blues meeting late last year. This is Wyden's In...

HEALTH 2.0/CONSUMERS: Susannah Fox on e-Patients and Health 2.0

Two fantastic video clips from a fantastic researcher. (Susannah runs the health research program at the Pew Internet and American Life program. Susannah's (brief) keynote including the seven word meme that dominated the day! Her interview afterwards:

TECH: Scott & me on Google and Microsoft

Scott Shreeve is blogging up a storm these days. Where he finds the time I don’t know. Today he has an excellent piece called Getting Giga Over Google (Again) which compares the Silicon Valley giant’s strategy with that of its...

HEALTH 2.0: Indu Subaiya's take

Thanks to Michael for his article and thanks to everyone for participating in such a fantastic day and a half. We're just getting the first round up of coverage (here's the San Diego Union-Tribune's piece which was on the Front...

Health 2.0 - An Uncompleted Van Gogh

By Michael Millenson Imagine today’s presentations at Health 2.0: User-Generated Healthcare, as looking the way a painting by Vincent Van Gogh might look if he had not yet stepped back from the canvas. In our painting, there is genius at...

The Unconference LiveBlog, cont'd

More from the Unconference floor: How can doctors get more involved in using technology in patient care? One point relative to doctor/hospital blogging: "Medical institutions have to get used to the fact that people know they are not infallible." Doctor...

Diving Deep with American Well by Craig Stoltz

American Well, an ambitious startup designed to provide virtual health/medical transactions between patients and doctors, has been invited to present its product overview in a thoroughgoing way--a deep dive, in Health 2.0 patois. In this liveblog, I need to control...

Liveblogging the Health 2.0 "Unconference" by Craig Stoltz

So Indu is on stage, introducing the Health 2.0 "Unconference"--user-led discussions around tables, all happening at the same time. Whoever submitted a topic gets to "hold court" at a table. So you are reading The Health Care Blog's liveblog of...

TECH/HEALTH 2.0: Eliza & Silverlink, strategic healthcom 2.0

So the gang is all in San Diego getting ready for the Health 2.0 conference which starts Monday (gulp, that's today!) Feverish last minute preparations are apace. I spent some time on Saturday morning talking to two people at the...

TECH: Drugs & technology--Allscripts and SafeMed

To finish off the last but not least of my HIMSS interviews, here are two companies that both announced being part of the Google ecosystem on the Thursday of HIMSS. One is well known and a leader in ePrescribing and...

TECH: Location tracking, RadarFind's view

I’m still hot on location tracking. The idea is that if you can locate devices like pumps and wheelchairs and eventually staff and patients, hospitals should become much more operationally efficient. But this market which is now 4–5 years old...

TECH/PODCAST: Microsoft speaks health care

Microsoft has made some big strides in health this past year. You can easily argue that a) its search has outpaced Google (following the acquisition of Medstory), b) that it’s making strides in the provider market with the renamed Amalga...

TECH: Interview with Newt Gingrich

The controversial and not-shy-with-his-opinions former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has been very active in recent years promoting the automation of health records and EMRs. But he’s never been a great pains to stress how that would get done...

TECH: Finishing up HIMSS!

HIMSS was an intense experience this year. Not only did I present on Health 2.0 at CHIME and at the Cisco Community for Connected Health, but I met lots of old friends and made some new ones at the ICW,...

Health 2.0 Conference -- the icyou videos

While we gear up for the conference on Monday and Tuesday, icyou has put all the September videos from the Health 2.0 San Francisco Conference up in one place!