The Health Care Blog

Critical of Critical

By Matthew Holt Like legions of other wonks when I discovered that Tom Daschle was going to be Obama’s point guy on health care, I sent off for a copy of his book Critical. It’s a fast and easy read,...

Is Massachusetts a model for national reform?

By Charlie Baker I get asked this question a lot these days, which shouldn’t be that surprising. Harvard Pilgrim is headquartered in Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts health care reform plan is already a couple of years old. More importantly, it...

Health and health care in 2009 - a year of managing risks and wild cards

By Jane Sarasohn Kahn As we inevitably do this time of year, we prognosticate about the new year. This time around, it's a toughie: there are too many uncertainties that preclude us from doing a straight-line forecast for 2009, especially...

My Health Care Reform House Party

By Michael L. Millenson The Obama-Biden Transition Team has encouraged individuals across the country to gather in small groups with friends and neighbors to discuss their ideas for health care reform. The team provided a background paper, discussion guide and...

“Get Well Soon” Wishes for Health Policy Pioneer Paul Ellwood

By Michael L. Millenson Here’s a greeting card conundrum. What exactly do you say to an 82-year old man who, emailing you about a joint project you were working on, notes that he has just survived “a 12-foot backward fall...

Merry Christmas & Happy Hols

By Matthew Holt Thanks for reading THCB this year. Thanks to to all the authors who we’ve featured and thanks to John and Sarah for keeping the train on the tracks. And thanks to all who commented and made THCB...

Naive policy makers need not apply

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released two comprehensive papers detailing the policy and financial options for health care reform: Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals and Budget Options, Volume I: Health Care. I can't...

AARP, online trends health IT and fixing US Healthcare

By Val Jones MD I had the chance to speak with John Rother, Executive Vice President of Policy and Strategy for the AARP about the intersection of online health, information technology (IT), and the baby boomer generation. Find out what...

Next Steps for Interoperability

By JOHN HALAMKA There are some folks in Washington who have made statements that we should delay investments in EHRs because current vendor products lack the functionality needed to support a coordinated healthcare system. Others have said that we lack...

An EHR We Can All Agree On

By Eric Novack This is a modified post from one I wrote in Nov of 2007. I report this as a part owner of a small business whose costs are increasing every year while revenues are decreasing. Therefore, I present...

JSK on Health IT in 2009

By Matthew Holt Savvy stuff, of course. Go read.

The Connected Medical Home: Health 2.0 Says "Hello" to the Medical Home Model

By David Kibbe & Joe Kvedar The concept of participatory medicine is taking hold, fueled, at least in part, by what we see as two complementary forces, these being the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) and Health 2.0. Health 2.0 is...

Prop 8 still reverberates, and bigotry is still with us

By Matthew Holt There’s a pretense from the anti (whoops!) pro-Prop 8 diehards that somehow this is not about them hating gay people. Rick Warren says that, as did Mike Huckerbee said when he ended his (clearly losing) conversation with...

Weighing in on the New FDA Commissioner

By MERRILL GOOZNER Patient advocacy groups, most of them drug industry-funded, have asked President-elect Barack Obama to appoint a Food and Drug Administration commissioner who won't cave in to pressure from lawmakers or the news media, according to the Wall...

Cool Technology of the Week

By John Halamka In my experience, social networking applications gain marketshare by being first to innovate and then spreading virally. I was an early adopter of Facebook but delayed joining Twitter, a microblog that enables me to post instant blog...

Conservatives Need to be Part of Health Care Reform

By Robert Laszewski Stuart Butler, Vice President of Domestic Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation has an op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Times, “Four Steps Can Heal Health Care.” He makes some very valuable points and proposes four steps toward reforming...

Interview with Fred Goldstein, US Preventive Medicine

By Matthew Holt Last year US Preventive Medicine (USPM) caused a little splash with some full page ads in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming itself the future of preventative care. Since then the company, which has raised a significant chunk...

Now United HealthGroup settles with investors, your Friday teaser

By Matthew Holt Can someone tell me how much money Bill McGuire has got left?

California transplant surgeon acquitted

By Sarah Arnquist A jury acquitted a San Francisco transplant surgeon Thursday of criminal charges related to his alleged actions during an attempted organ harvest nearly three years ago in a small town on California's central coast. In what's thought...

The Medicare Ponzi Scheme

By Eric Novack Just today, our next President spoke out against the largest investment swindle in US history. The alleged behavior of Bernard Madoff may have cost investors up to $50 billion. “In the last few days, the alleged scandal...

Washington, Please Don't Bail Out the Health Care Industry

By RICK PETERS A health care Marshall Plan -- $50 Billion stimulus to get electronic health records (EHRs) in every doctor’s hands or $50,000 to each physician -– what an incredible marketing job. Detroit, are you listening? Stop whining to...

An Open Letter to the Obama Health Team

By David C. Kibbe & Brian Klepper It seems likely that the Obama administration and Congress will spend a significant amount on health IT by attaching it as a first-order priority to the fiscal stimulus package. We take the President-elect...

Jack says cover the uninsured & spend less!

By Matthew Holt It’s no secret what the Dartmouth group’s solution for the health care system has been — reduce practice variation, get surgery and physician resource use rates similar to the Mayo Clinics' of the world, and take the...

Health 2.0 Conference is hiring

By Matthew Holt As the conference grows up and does more, Matthew & Indu are looking to get some help! We are looking for a Conference Project and Production Manager and also a Registration, Customer Service & Sales Manager. These...

ePatient Dave & his doc Danny Sands speak out

By Matthew Holt One of the most remarkable people I’ve met this year is Dave deBronkart, better known as ePatient Dave (fourth from left on top of the e-Patients.net blog). Dave has had a remarkable recovery from cancer and has...

The Hospitalist as Bed Czar: Indispensability, But At What Cost?

By Bob Wachter In last week’s Annals of Internal Medicine, Eric Howell and colleagues describe an innovative experiment in which the hospitalists at Johns Hopkins Bayview became the institution’s bed czars. It worked. So should my program and yours take...

The Inevitability of Health Care Reform: This Time, the Politics Have Changed

By Michael Millenson Rummaging through my extensive files (i.e., drawers of paper), I came across this January/February 2001 issue of Healthplan, the magazine of the old American Association of Health Plans before it gobbled up the Health Insurance Association of...

Low tech ways to improve patient care: sleep and manners

By Michael Miller, MD A few recent reports point to ways for improving the quality of physician delivered care that has little to do with technology or complex interventions. The first involves how physicians interact with patients, and the second...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)

The L.A. Times reports on the financial difficulties of primary care docs in solo practices. Are large group practices the way of the future? MartketWatch reports on how interactive video games are motivating people to get active. The NY Times...

A new national privacy and security framework for HIT

By Bob Coffield The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) issued a paper Monday called The Nationwide Privacy and Security Framework for Electronic Exchange of Individually Identifiable Health Information. The summary states that the framework creates...

From the fiscal to the physical: insured workers try to lower their medical costs

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn This is open enrollment season for those workers fortunate enough to (1) still be employed and (2) still be offered a health benefit. It’s also the season of economic decline. These workers are making different health and...

On Health Care Reform Stimulating the Economy: The Massachusetts Example

By Maggie Mahar Recently, a somewhat starry-eyed op-ed in the New York Times suggested that a $100 billion annual investment in universal health care is just the medicine that our economy needs. The goal, declared Jonathan Gruber, a professor of...

EMR use: on the steep part of the S curve, or being replaced by a new idea?

By Matthew Holt Ten plus years ago, I was giving talks suggesting that at some point relatively soon the EMR was going to become a reality. In 1999, at Harris Interactive I actually got the chance to launch a study...

Dispatches from IHI's quality forum

By Amanda Goltz Don Berwick is one of the leading lights of the health care quality world; an oft-quoted and published visionary who founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to spread the gospel of transformation and improvement around the world....

Health Wonk Review. Vince K Drag-net's it in

By Matthew Holt Health Wonk Review: The Just the Facts, Ma'am Edition. Superbly done, even if I never saw the TV show.

Slicing the health reform pie

By Robert Laszewski I doubt anyone would disagree with the statement that America’s health care costs are too high, continue to grow at an unsustainable rate, and reform is critical to control costs, get everyone covered, and improve quality. In...

Shifting costs from public to private payers

By Charlie Baker The other day, the American Hospital Association, the Blue Cross / Blue Shield Association, Premera Blue Cross and America’s Health Insurance Plans (FYI - HPHC is a member and I’m on the Board of AHIP) released a...

Electronic Medical Records and Obama's Economic Plan

By John Halamka On Dec. 6, President-elect Obama announced the three major pillars of his economic recovery plan: rebuild our roads/bridges, enhance our schools including broadband, and deploy electronic health records for every clinician and hospital in the U.S. I...

Open source is a transparent Trojan horse

By Scott Shreeve I have been blogging and twittering from the World Health Innovation and Technology conference this week while waiting to present today. The keynote speaker before me was Scott McNealy, the Chairman and founder of Sun Microsystems. He...

Healthcare and the Job Market

By MERRILL GOOZNER Looking for a bright spot in Friday’s dismal job report? Think how bad it would have been had the health care sector not added 52,100 jobs last month. That’s right. While the rest of the economy was...

Management guru Tom Peters likes Health 2.0, Wennberg, PLM, Millenson, but not the medical establishement

By Matthew Holt I didn't know that Tom Peters (the In Search of Excellence guy) knew or cared about health care, but he certainly does. In just one blog posting he reveals his impatience (putting it mildly) with the general...

Who should Obama pick for FDA Commissioner?

By John Mack It seems like everyone in the Pharma Blogosphere and the press is recommending who president-elect Barack Obama should nominate as the new FDA Commissioner to replace Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach. A few weeks ago, I created the...

Holland, pay-or-play and the WSJ Opinion page making sense?

By Matthew Holt Don’t worry, the WSJ Opinion only makes sense because they let Zeke Emmanuel and Ron Wyden write an op-ed. The article is called Why Tie Health Insurance to a Job? and it’s impossible to argue with the...

The Medical Home Bandwagon and the One-Hoss Shay: Expectations and Assumptions

By RICHARD REECE, MD Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay that was built in such a wonderful way? Logic is logic. That’s all I say. Now in building of a chaise, I tell you there is always somewhere...

Bad economy leads to poor health behaviors

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn Half of people over 45 said in a recent AARP survey they've taken a generic drug or over-the-counter (OTC) medication instead of a prescription drug due to the current economic situation. The AARP's report, "Impact of the...

Help RWJF choose the most influential research

By Sarah Arnquist Each year, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation selects 10 research articles that made a significant contribution to the policy arena. This year, the Foundation wants you to help winnow the selection. The Foundation wants you to select...

PatientsLikeMe keeps getting more famous

By Matthew Holt Here’s the CBS News clip that ran about PatientsLikeMe last week Of course you’ve probably already seen the Business Week article about Health 2.0 which quotes Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and little ol’ me. Cathy Arnst did a nice...

Transforming medicine and saving lives

By Sarah Arnquist This week, Don Berwick will announce the results of the 5 Million Lives Campaign before thousands of people in Nashville attending the National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care. Twenty years ago, it was almost heretical...

Resident Duty Hours and Patient Safety: Did The IOM Get It Right?

By Bob Wachter The Institute of Medicine just released its long-awaited report on trainee duty hours. It is well researched and balanced, and its recommendations appropriately reflect what we know vs. what we believe. Now the fun begins. Let’s start...

We have research on treatment efficacy -- now let's use it

By Maggie Mahar and Niko Karvounis The New York Times published a story this month about one of the biggest medical trials ever organized by the federal government, a study that showed that the newest, most expensive drugs used to...