The Health Care Blog

Too much data but not enough information

By John Halamka During the decade I've been CIO, IT operating budgets have been 2 percent of my organization's total budget, which is typical for the health care industry. During the same period, IT budgets for the financial services industry...

Judging personal health records by their usefulness

By Josh Seidman It appears that at least the first phase of personal health record (PHR) certification from CCHIT (Certification Commission on Health Information Technology) will focus on a narrow set of attributes. CCHIT Chairman Mark Leavitt told a group...

Will We Need a Bailout of the Health Care System, Too?

By David Kibbe A huge bailout is being planned in Washington to avert a calamity that was brought about, in large measure, by the financial system operating the way financial operators told us it was supposed to function. The money...

Health 2.0 Update - Monday 9/29/08

A heads up for THCB readers - if you're thinking of attending Health 2.0 and still haven't signed up for your pass, you may want to think about acting now. Our last two events sold out well in advance and...

The Chances of Reform Are Now - You guessed it - Zero

By Robert Laszewski A couple of weeks ago I did a post, The Pretend Presidential Debate on Health Care--The Health Care Press Needs to Force the Presidential Candidates to Get Real on Health Care "Change". In it I made the...

Big administrator is watching you

By Bob Wachter Last week, came the announcement that Suzanne Delbanco, founding director of the Leapfrog Group, has assumed the presidency of a company that tracks compliance with safety and quality practices via remote video. Big Brother, meet the Joint...

Mental health parity & insurance mandates

By Sarah Arnquist Last week, Congress got a step closer to passing a Mental Health Parity bill after years of debating the issue. The bill would require insurance companies to provide the same coverage for physical and mental ailments. For...

Cognitive Surplus & Tough Economic Times: An Explosive Cocktail?

By Gilles Frydman Gilles Frydman is Founder & President of the Association of Cancer Online Resources, the largest online support group for cancer patients. He also blogs regularly at e-patients.net, where this post first appeared. The growth of the e-Patients...

New blog of women offering fresh ideas

By Sarah Arnquist A group of powerful women have joined forces to add their voices and shape the dialogue about health care issues through a new blog, Disruptive Women in health care. The site is intended to be "a springboard...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

Esther Dyson explains why she believes Health 2.0 companies, such as Organized Wisdom are a great investment. Dyson has been an early investor and guiding influence on many technology start-ups, including including 23andMe, Medstory (which was acquired by Microsoft), PatientsLikeMe,...

Mixed reception for hospital ID bracelets

By Sarah Arnquist Color-coded hospital bracelets intending to identify categories of patients and prevent errors by ensuring they receive proper care have received a mixed reception, the New York Times reports. Red bracelets indicate allergies, amber says the patient has...

A Genius Shines…And, Where the Light Doesn’t, Hospitals Don’t

By Michael L. Millenson It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that hospitals could dramatically reduce the hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries they unintentionally cause patients ever year, but it may take a genius to coax change...

Some good news in health care, really

By Jocelyn Guyer Even as the economy has fallen into an abyss and I find myself with distressing frequency discussing with people whether Levi Johnston really loves Bristol Palin, it turns out that there is actually some good news out...

If you can stay awake, the candidates' health plans explained

By Sarah Arnquist The New England Journal of Medicine and Harvard University teamed up to bring you this compelling, hour-long nail-biter of Gail Wilensky and David Cutler discussing their respective candidates' health plans. I wonder if the NEJM has had...

Speaking of ordinary folks ...

By Sarah Arnquist PBS will air its film, "Critical Condition," at 9 p.m. Tuesday Sept. 30. Here's what PBS says about the film: What happens if you fall sick and are one of 47 million people in America without health...

Study Shows Unpaid Medical Bills Put Families in Debt

By Shuka Kalantari While the federal government plans to bail out the financial sector with $700 billion of taxpayer dollars, a growing number of tax payers are grappling to get themselves out of debt from unpaid health care bills. Yesterday's...

Bill of Health -- a Good move

By Sarah Arnquist Good Magazine has this interesting graphical representation of the problems facing health care in the U.S. Considering how complex health care is, I think it's a great attempt to put lots of information visually on one page...

Evidence of a Need for Change

By THCB Staff The Health Care Blog regular Michael Millenson wrote a great piece recently in Miller-McCune Magazine on the necessity of practicing more evidenced-based medicine, and why it's not happening. Here is a powerful snippet but it's definitely worth...

Divying the pain

By Jim Jaffe When campaigning politicians talk about reforming America’s health care system, they’re understandably quiet in identifying who will take the pain that will ultimately be allocated between the three basic groups involved –- patients, providers and payers. If...

Health reform prospects in the wake of Black Sunday

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation,"...

Health care expansion? Forget about it

By Jeff Goldsmith "Jane has missed the most obvious implication of the implosion: the bailout will use up the fiscal margin for any subsidized solution to health reform. There will simply be no extra dollars in the federal budget for...

Addressable Health 2.0 market opportunities

By Vijay Goel Last week was an interesting one in Health 2.0, most notably for the disagreement on the direction of Health 2.0 that turned personal between Matthew Holt and Dmitriy Kruglyak. Also, Fard Johnmar summed up nicely the potential...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

New surgery technique uses the somebody's existing openings to allow for scarless surgery, the Washington Post reports. The new experimental procedure takes "minimally invasive to a new level." Microsoft plans to buy back another $40 billion of its own stock...

Health Affairs makes an apPaul(y)ing choice

By Matthew Holt Health Affairs ran a couple of partisan analyses last week. Joseph Antos, of AEI, Gail Wilensky, former Bush 41 HCFA administrator, and Hans Kuttner labeled the Obama plan as excessive tax and spend socialized gulag regulation. In...

Cost of insurance mandates

By Charlie Baker A few months ago, the MA Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (DHCFP) released a study that showed that mandated health insurance benefits cost insurance purchasers about $1.3 billion - or 12% of their premiums -...

Free Lunch: David Cay Johnston off the leash

By Matthew Holt A version of this review appeared at Spot-on last week, but as you know over there I get heavily edited by Chris Nolan who's a real journalist and all that. The beauty of the zero cost of...

23andme gets unwanted publicity

By Matthew Holt Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and husband of 23andme co-founder Anne Wojcicki, has announced that he has the gene for Parkinson’s disease and that his mother carries it to. She already has the disease, as did her aunt....

Cognitive dissonance in U.S. health care

By Maggie Mahar Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt is well known as one of the bluntest—and wittiest—critics of U.S. Healthcare. Last week, we both spoke at a conference organized by Princeton’s Policy Research Institute on “Access to Universal Health Care: New...

McCain, Obama and Palin show ignorance on economic turmoil

By Don Johnson The presidential candidates, Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain, and the vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin are showing in their comments on the financial crisis that none of them understand the crisis, the economy or what’s behind the...

The treadmill-desk mashup goes primetime

By Sarah Arnquist Could walking at a tortoise pace all day long in the office keep you thin or help you lose weight? Many people seem to think so and have built themselves treadmill desks -- basically a treadmill with...

Health Wonk Review is up

Jaan Sidirov at Disease Management Care Blog did a great job combining the best of the health blogs for this issue of Health Wonk Review.

Controlling costs is the central problem in U.S. health care

By Stephen Beller The central problem in the U.S. health care system isn’t cost or insurance, per se, it’s the challenge of increasing health care value to the patient/consumer. That means we must improve the poor quality and inefficiency of...

Weak analysis about the "demise of Health 2.0"

By Matthew Holt Everyone’s favorite naysayer Dmitriy Kruglyak is getting very self-satisfied this morning about the failure of Revolution Health to change the world in three years. Normally, I leave Dmitriy's bizarre wofflings alone, but because he's directly "pointed the...

On the Road Again: Health 2.0 Motorcycle Tour

By David Kibbe In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Robert Pirsig writes about the different reactions to our experiences living with modern technology, which he describes as romantic, classic, and a third and completely separate element and perspective,...

Exploring and conquering new health care frontiers

By Scott Shreeve The September/October issue of Health Affairs is dedicated to reviewing concepts of the medical home. It is most likely the most current, authoritative, and impressive review of this emerging idea. Health Affairs is an excellent resource for...

Forcing the candidates to get real on health care change

By Robert Laszewski Let's pretend that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain will be able to implement their respective health care reform plans if elected. This exercise should be easy. We've been doing it for months now. Or, we can...

Adding layers to Health 2.0

By Susannah Fox Jen McCabe Gorman drew a picture at HealthCampDC last that I really liked. Luckily, I found this image of her Medicine 2.0 presentation, so nobody has to decipher my sketch. The one difference is that, on Friday,...

When is the same spending more spending?

By Matthew Holt When it's routed through the government because their spending is done with mythically different dollars than private spending. Or at least it is in the bizzaro world of free-marketeer policy analysts. Let me explain… A couple of...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

The majority of ER patients leave confused and with unanswered questions, which can contribute to medication errors and return visits, the New York Times reports. And the study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine was among English speakers! Imagine...

Golden Rule Founder dies

By Matthew Holt It is not seemly to speak ill of the dead so this is all you’ll hear from me about the passing of Patrick Rooney, founder of Golden Rule. An obituary is here.

Health 2.0--time to make a move

The Health 2.0 Conference is a scant 5 & 1/2 weeks away, and as of Monday midnight on the west coast the rate for attending goes up $300 to the full rack rate. So please visit www.health2con.com and get your...

The health search future

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Over the past couple of weeks, the eHealth world learned that RevolutionHealth engaged Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, to help assess the company's 'alternatives.' The early talk was to raise capital, but the tenor seems to have...

The problem with astroturf

By Matthew Holt ....is that sometimes real weeds might sneak in and mess up the nice green carpeting you’re laying down. To wit, here's an exchange between an SEIU member and AHIP President Karen Ignagni at the AHIP astroturf meeting...

What's on the horizon of Medicine 2.0

By Neil Versel Travel and deadlines got in the way of me posting about the second day of the recent Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto, but I saved my notes. Something super-cool I saw there: Medting.com, a "global" repository of...

Has Steve Poizner gone soft?

By Matthew Holt California’s de facto health insurance commissioner Lisa Girion reports on California’s actual Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner’s agreement with Healthnet. After all that fuss, the deal is that Healthnet pays $14m in canceled medical bills, reinstates around 1,000...

Perils of Pay for Performance

By Josh Siedman Dr. Sandeep Jauhar wrote an essay this week in the New York Times about the perils of pay-for-performance (P4P). Specifically, Dr. Jauhar discusses how P4P may have unintended consequences and create perverse incentives due to poorly designed...

Wonder if your doctor is laughing at you?

By Sarah Arnquist That CNN headline grabbed my attention and got me to read a column that basically chastises the 17 percent of internal medicine residents who reported they had laughed at patient in a survey published in JAMA. The...

McGuire not in prison. Reyes is. Anyone understand?

By Matthew Holt So Bill McGuire has settled with CALPers in the scandal where he backdated the value of his United HealthGroup stock options. He’ll pay a $30m fine which sounds a lot but is a rounding error on his...

Creating a Facebook-like medical record

By Bob Wachter The explosive growth of Facebook and MySpace illustrates the market for electronic tools to enhance communication and collaboration. Could there possibly be another workplace more in need of social networking tools than the modern hospital? If you...

Remember pensions? The big differences between Obama & McCain's health care plans

By Robert Laszewski This election is different than any other on the issue of health care because both candidates are giving us serious blueprints to reorganize America's health care system and those blueprints are very very different. As voters, you...