The Health Care Blog

The Obama Health care Budget

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Pieces of the health care portion of the Obama budget are leaking out. Based upon published reports, the Obama “down payment on health care reform” will include: $634 billion to help pay for health care reform over...

Are We Mature Enough to Make Use of Comparative Effectiveness Research?

By Robert Wachter, MD Thanks to White House budget director Peter Orszag, a Dartmouth Atlas aficionado, $1.1 billion found its way into the stimulus piñata for “comparative effectiveness” research. Terrific, but – to paraphrase Jack Nicholson – can we handle...

For the Obama Administration Health Care Reform Will Require Tough Cost Containment

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI The President has made a powerful argument— America cannot get its economic house under control without comprehensive health care reform. The cost of existing entitlements - public and private —and any new ones are just too big...

Novel Data Sources for Quality Improvement

By JOHN HALAMKA This Thursday I gave a presentation to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) about measuring quality using "traditional" and emerging, novel sources of healthcare data. My definition of traditional data sources that are currently...

Commentology

Helen Darling of the National Business Group on Health wrote in to comment on the thread on Robert Laszewski's post on the realities behind the Obama health plan. ("For the Obama administration health care reform will require cost containment.") We...

Making Price Competition Work

By ROGER COLLIER Part 1 of this two-part piece asked why Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” seems to be affected by a palsy that causes health care price competition to fail, especially when employers and employees select health plans. This part...

I really don't understand Wall Street, part 98

By Matthew Holt On the campaign trail Obama said that he would if elected cut the overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans by about $15bn a year. Once elected he confirmed that he would. Stupid me thought that this would mean...

Musings on Integrating Care at the IOM

By Matthew Holt So I’m in DC figuring out how the East coast medical policy elite tries to change the world. While the rest of DC is buzzing about Obama’s speech and budget, The Institute of Medicine is having a...

Consumers Need All of the Facts in the Privacy Debate

By David St. Clair The economic stimulus package that President Obama has signed contains upwards of $20 billion to create electronic health records for most Americans within five years. The president has been very outspoken in his belief that EHRs...

Dartmouth Atlas -- cool new tool

By Matthew Holt The Dartmouth Atlas releases this afternoon a really cool interactive atlas showing the disparity in Medicare spending between states AND showing the relative growth rates in spending between metro areas. Fabulous graphics, fantastic research and much much...

Why Technology is No Longer Optional in Public Health

By ANDRE BLACKMAN So I just got back from a very informative & interactive event where I learned about the application of mobile technologies in creating social change. It’s here at this meeting of the socially-conscious minds and the focus...

Medpedia: Who gets to say what info is reliable?

By e-Patient Dave Unless you’ve been offline since last week, you know that Medpedia has gone into public beta. I have a concern about the reliability of their model, based on my personal experience and the self-education I’ve been doing...

Health costs increase despite recession

By Merrill Goozner The latest one- and ten-year outlook for health care spending from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects health care spending growing 50 percent faster than growth in the overall economy. By 2018, health care will...

Commentology

Michael Millenson had this response to a commenter in the thread on his recent post looking at web sites that offer the public data about provider performance. (' Just OK Quality or the Best? ') "Why does HealthGrades get so...

Getting "the CCHIT question" wrong

By Matthew Holt There’s been a lot of blather from one commenter (who may or may not be a front for a group of malcontents) on the WSJ Health Blog and lots of other blogs about CCHIT and whether it...

Health reform for health's sake

By Sarah Arnquist If the goal of health reform is to improve Americans' health, then the debate needs to broaden to focus on issues outside the medical system that often play a greater role in determining health. That’s the message...

Finding a Faster Route From Patent to Patient

By Wendy Everett As the health reform debate intensifies, the rightful role of medical technologies is stuck squarely in the middle, caught in a simplistic tug-of-war over whether these innovations raise or lower health care costs. Instead of this argument,...

Making Price Competition Work

By ROGER COLLIER Wall Street Journal editorial writers and other folk with touching faith in classic economic theory wonder from time to time why competition doesn’t work better in the health care system. (Actually, the WSJ people are sure that...

Economic Forces Reshaping Medicare Drug Benefit

By Bonnie Washington After years of relative consumer inertia in the Medicare drug benefit plan selection process, the economy created the first real test of Medicare drug plans' stickiness. Would seniors stay loyal to their last drug plan choice, or...

Open Source Health Research

By Matthew Holt I'm doing a first for THCB which is a IM chat interview. On the other side of the keyboard (so to speak) is Alexandra Carmichael who is the CEO of CureTogether.com. Hi Alex! Alexandra: Hi Matthew, nice...

Commentology

Joe Flower had this to say in response to criticism of comparative effectiveness research in the comment thread on his post ("Fear and Loathing Over the Stimulus Bill") examining the backlash against the Health IT provisions in the stimulus package...

Raising the Price Before You Put It On Sale

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI The Obama budget team has made it clear they are going into the next federal budget process playing it straight on many fronts that the prior administration had fudged on. The cost of the wars, the cost...

Betsy McCraker misses the point, again

By Matthew Holt Not content with being the catalyst for the unleashing of a torrent of vitriol in the direction of those Milquetoast individuals who are in favor of better information systems in health care, in the mild expectation that...

Yelp: The Backlash Begins...

By Matthew Holt There's a pretty serious article about Yelp, which has become the dominant player in restaurant and service reviews in the SF Bay Area, in a local alternative weekly The East Bay Express called Yelp and the Business...

Disruption breaking out over at Scott Shreeve's place

Clayton Christensen's publisher is pressing me to read The Innovators Prescription and then interview him. Sadly I haven’t had the time to pay the book the attention it deserves. Messrs Kuraitis & Kibbe already did a review on THCB and...

Unpacking ARRA

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn “The world changed yesterday at 1 pm Mountain time," Steve Lieber, President of the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), told over 1,500 attendees of a webinar on February 18. These new times, Lieber said, "will require...

Skipping out on America's future

By Landon Gibbs and Brent Parton Remember what it feels like to gorge yourself on a meal with friends only to find when the bill arrives, your tablemates have conveniently slipped off into the washroom? Well hopefully not, (if so,...

Divided we might get somewhere, but not yet

By MATTHEW HOLT The NY Times describes the Republican-less lobbyist meetings with Democrats that are allegedly getting towards a consensus on an individual mandate as the way to universal health care. Funnily enough some of those same groups (e.g. The...

Connecting the dots--Uninsured people are poor!

By MATTHEW HOLT A bunch of random articles all hit at once on Wednesday morning. And they win the John Madden award for stating the bleedingly obvious. This is kind of a companion piece to my rant about Friday's NY...

Dying More Efficiently

By Al Lewis A restaurant which insisted on giving us more food than we wanted, and wouldn’t let us leave until we ate it all, and sent the other diners the check for our extra portions, would go out of...

Commentology

John Haughton MD left this thought-provoking follow up to his original post on the Obama administration's health IT plans. ("Stimulus Bill Offers Docs Incentives, But Demands Effective Use") "Since writing the post 2 weeks ago, the Stimulus bill has now...

Fear and Loathing over the Stimulus Bill

By JOE FLOWER The reaction in certain quarters to the healthcare reform provisions of the stimulus bill now clearing Congress lays bare the nature of opposition to the forthcoming fight for real change in healthcare: It will be viciousness at...

Just OK Quality or “The Best”?

By Michael L. Millenson The folks at the Oklahoma Hospital Association might want to get together with the Commonwealth Fund to see if they can borrow a URL for their hospital quality Web site. Using the two-letter abbreviation for the...

Massachusetts doctors say single-payer or bust

By Sarah Arnquist Massachusetts members of the Physicians for a National Health Program released a report today faulting the state's experiment with health reform for failing to achieve universal coverage, being too expensive and draining funds away from safety-net providers....

Job Post: Causality Inc.

We are seeking a full-time partner/investor to build a new company that dramatically improves the way millions of patients learn and shop online. We address a $70 billion market. Our current team consists of seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists and physicians from...

CASTING CALL: The Future Role of the Doctor

Health 2.0 is working on a new documentary focusing on the next generation of physicians and healthcare professionals. We are looking to cast 3-5 medical students who are willing to share their perspectives on how the field of medicine is...

Podcast: Blues VC fund invests in Phreesia

By MATTHEW HOLT I’ve been following Phreesia since it was two guys in an apartment trying to figure out how to make the patient check-in at the doctors office a better and more useful experience. Today they announced an $11m...

Calendar: The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009

ADVERTISEMENT The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009: Impact & Opportunity in the Obama Plan, Thu. Feb. 26, 2009, 5:45 pm in Boston with Keynote Jim Roosevelt of Tufts and the Obama Transition Team and panelists Jim Glaser of Partners, Jonathan Bush...

An Interview with Lynn Jennings, CEO of WeCare TLC, an Onsite Clinic Company

By RICHARD REECE The American entrepreneurial economy distinctly differs from that of socialistic European economies. American organizations must be able to make decisions based on proximity to performance, the market, technology, society, environment, and demographics. In Europe, on the other...

Checklists (The Sequel)

By Bob Wachter Last month’s New England Journal included another astounding checklist study, an international extravaganza that found nearly 50% reductions in mortality and complications after implementation of pre- and post-op surgical safety checklists. Wow. Coincidentally, I read the study,...

Commentology

MToubbeh, MD wrote us in response to Eric Novack's slightly incendiary post. ("The Expansion of the Federal Healthcare Bureaucracy Bill") I don't think that when we built the Highway system in the country that people were worried that the Government...

The Japanese Dr. Koop

By John Halamka As readers of my blog know, I'm a great fan of the Japanese culture, lifestyle, and people. I'm on a speaking tour of the country this week, meeting with government, academia, and industry leaders in Tokyo, Nagoya...

The Stimulus Pregame

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI "Drug Makers Fight Stimulus Provision" "Lobbying War Ensues Over Digital Data" The first was a recent and the second headline comes from the Washington Post. Both refer to what were supposed to be two already agreed on...

Why Clinical Groupware May Be the Next Big Thing in Health IT

By David C. Kibbe What would you call health care software that: Is Web-based and networkable, therefore highly scalable and inexpensive to purchase and use; Provides a 'unified view' of a patient from multiple sources of data and information; Is...

The Expansion of the Federal Health Care Bureaucracy Bill

By ERIC NOVACK With the conference report available on the web, here are the references to the health care provisions in the conference report of the 'stimulus' bill. I have not gone into great detail on the privacy provisions (which...

A Consumer Advocate's Take On the Economic Stimulus and HIT

By Eva Powell In light of all the discussion about the Economic Recovery Plan and the privacy provisions in the HIT Title, I thought it might be helpful to provide a consumer advocate’s view. The National Partnership for Women &...

Frances Dare, Cisco's optimist, and KP's Garfield Center

By Matthew Holt From time to time we check in with my pal Frances Dare who is Cisco’s optimist about the impact that IT will have on health care (FD I’ve worked for Cisco in the past). Here’s an interview...

Commentology

Jay wrote in on Dr. John Haughton's post on the health IT provisions in the latest version of the stimulus package. ("Stimulus bill offers docs big incentives for technology, but demands effective use.") "While a move to EMR is a...

10 Simple Rules For a Non-adversarial Healthcare System

By Peter Nesbitt Most discussions regarding health care focus on parts that need fixing. Health care has many parts and some are broken and some aren't. But if we want to solve the problem, first we better decide on whether...

Missing in action: The National Coalition on Health Care

By Roger Collier Browsing through some 2007 entries in Bob Laszewski’s Healthcare Policy and Marketplace Review blog recently, I came across Bob’s rave review for a health care reform proposal from the National Coalition on Health Care. The National Coalition,...