The Health Care Blog

Interview with Sage Software, Lindy Benton, COO & Maureen Peszko, SVP

By MATTHEW HOLT Lindy Benton, COO & Maureen Peszko Senior Vice President, Strategy and Business Development at Sage Software, at the HIMSS conference April 3, 2009

Commentology:

Microsoft's, Bill Crounse, said this about David Kibbe's article, "The Parable of the Wicked EMR." "Excellent, well written piece, David. Thanks for sharing your insights. It is important to not only meet the regulatory and privacy requirements associated with health...

Community: Online Bone Marrow Drive

By JOSH LEINWAND I am a first-year medical student, president of the Yale Medical Student Council, and a reader of the Health Care Blog. I am writing to make you aware of an effort among members of my class to...

Op-Ed: Patients first. Doctors second.

By Arun Mohan, MD, MBA and Gordon Moore, MD As part of the recently enacted stimulus bill the federal government is spending $19 billion to promote the adoption of electronic medical records by physicians. Yet, with all the focus on...

Medicity, CEO Kip Lassetter and SVP Robert Connely

By MATTHEW HOLT Medicity, CEO Kip Lassetter & SVP Robert Connely talk about the Medicity/Novo merger and what the combined company does. Interviewed by Matthew Holt for The Health Care Blog, April 3, 2009 at HIMSS

Medicine's Missing Foundation for Health Care Reform

By LAWRENCE L. WEED & LINCOLN WEED Preface by Michael Millenson: Lawrence L. Weed published a seminal article in the Archives of Internal Medicine on using the medical record to improve patient care back in January, 1971. To give you...

Job Post: Transplant Cardiologist

Do you desire the opportunity to start a program at a large, academic medical center? If so, Orlando Health will help you elevate your career! Our 1,780-bed health system is establishing a Heart Transplant Program that will be dependent upon...

A.D.A.M., Inc Launches New iPhone Application, Medzio

This past week at the Health 2.0 conference, A.D.A.M., Inc demoed their recently launched iphone application Medzio, which connects users with a network of healthcare services and free expert health advice. It's a very cool application and an exciting new...

Roni Zeiger on what Google Health is doing next

By Matthew Holt For those of you who weren't at Health 2.0 Meets Ix to hear from the mouths of the four horsemen (Halamka, Sands, Zeiger & deBronkhart) here is Google's Roni Zeiger’s version of what went wrong with the...

Capstone conference, May 14: Fresh thinking on health care reform

Matthew’s note: imagine that several of your intellectual health care policy wonk heroes were teaming up with at least one big time industry player that you sometimes love to hate, but who’s always a great source of thinking. Imagine that...

Op-Ed: Seven Strategies to Address the Nation's Health Care Crisis

By SUSAN J. BLUMENTHAL M.D., M.P.A. and DENIS A. CORTESE, M.D America's health crisis does not have either a single cause or a silver bullet solution. Yet previous attempts at reform have often focused too narrowly on the financing and...

Where's THCB's share of the money? Or does Stuart Browning feel left out?

By Matthew Holt My lefty friends at Moveon.org emailed me (and a few million others) appalled that Rick Scott’s group is going to be spending $1 million running ads attacking the as yet officially non-existent Baucus/Daschle/deParle/Obama health plan. Now that’s...

Health 2.0 Met Ix....

By Matthew Holt So the party's over, the buntings are down, the #health2con tweets—more than 3,000 of them—are drying up but recorded here, and the Health 2.0 & Ix teams have returned to their respective coasts. Even though this is...

Blog Rally for Roxana Saberi and others

Bloggers across the web are holding a blog rally in support of Roxana Saberi, who is spending her birthday on a hunger strike in Tehran's Evin Prison, where she has been incarcerated for espionage. According to NPR, "The Iranian Political...

Reforming Long-Term Care and Post-Acute Care Could Save Billions

By Anne Tumlinson Despite the extreme inside-the-Beltway focus on healthcare reform, there’s been hardly a mention of tackling reform of our long-term care system. This is curious when you stop to consider that these services are used by the same...

Health 2.0 vs. Ix Therapy

By MICHAEL MILLENSON I was staring at the program cover for the special joint conference between Health 2.0 and the Center for Information Therapy going on here in Boston when a sudden realization jumped out at me: both of these...

An Open Letter to the New National Coordinator for Health IT - Untying HITECH's Gordian Knot: Part 1

By DAVID C. KIBBE & BRIAN KLEPPER Congratulations to David Blumenthal on being named National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT). Dr. Blumenthal will be the person most responsible for the rules and distribution of the American Recovery and Reinvestment...

A Shout out to our sponsors

THCB would not quite simply not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors and advertisers. We'd like to extend a warm welcome to our newest corporate supporter, the wonderful folks at Sage, makers of industry leading healthcare applications...

Should You Keep Your Own Medical Records?

By RAHUL PARIKH, MD Over the past 18 months, technology companies are jumping into one the biggest untapped frontiers in the economy: Health care. Among the groups taking the leap are Microsoft and Google. Both have launched products called Personal...

Op-Ed: Health care reform is within reach

By GARY APPLEBAUM In recent weeks, President Obama has gotten flack for insisting that, despite the nation's urgent economic problems, "health care reform cannot wait." On this point, though, he's absolutely right. But that doesn't mean we need more government...

Health 2.0 Meets Ix--Tweeted

By Matthew Holt I’ll be up with reflections on an action packed Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference later, but for now is you want to see the 1500+ tweets from Thursday alone, Gilles Frydman has figured out how to get...

MedEncentive: a breakthrough in healthcare cost containment

MedEncentive helps employers and insurers achieve cost control by rewarding both consumers and their doctors for incorporating “best medical practices” and advancing patient education and empowerment, while motivating healthy behaviors. Through innovative incentives, we help employers, health insurers and governments...

An Open Letter to the New National Coordinator for Health IT: Part 2 - Opening the Aperture of Innovation

By DAVID C. KIBBE & BRIAN KLEPPER One of the important decisions before Dr. Blumenthal and his colleagues at ONC and HHS is whether the national health information network will be one of closed appliances that bundle together proprietary hardware,...

LOHAS Forum June 17-19th, 2009 Boulder, CO

For 13 years, Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) has brought together top-level business leaders from multinational corporations, mid-sized companies, entrepreneurs, as well as celebrities and executives of non-profit organizations active in the areas of health and wellness products, sustainable...

A.D.A.M intros Medzio Mobile Health Partners

By Matthew Holt For you iPhone-ers (and there are lots and of you--30 million plus was the last number I heard) there's some exciting news (that actually concerns Health 2.0 and THCB too). A.D.A.M has launched a new platform on...

Health 2.0 Fuels the Accelerator

By AARON APODACA, JULIE MURCHINSON, MATTHEW HOLT & INDU SUBAIYA Have fuel, will accelerate! In the months leading up to the Fall Health 2.0 Conference, the Accelerator wiki membership grew from a few to over a hundred individuals and companies...

Mayo & Microsoft--a big name collaboration, with even more potential to come

By Matthew Holt Mayo Clinic and Microsoft are today launching a combined product called the Mayo Clinic Health Manager (and they’ll be showing it Thursday 23rd at the Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference). What this product does is essentially combine...

It's Amy Tendrich's birthday, time for Grand Rounds

By Matthew Holt It's Amy Tendrich's birthday. I happen to know she's on a plane on her way to Health 2.0 Meets Ix in Boston, but that hasn't stopped her putting together a great Grand Rounds at DiabetesMine.

What is the Physician's Role in a Web-based World?

By JAY PARKINSON, MD With all of the super accessible health information now available, consumers have turned into the equivalent of first year medical students, armed with too much information but not enough objective experience. The ideal doctor patient relationship...

Surface--eye candy or really useful clinical tool?

By Matthew Holt Microsoft Surface is relatively cheap for what appears to be a too-cool-for-school new technology. They quoted me about $12,000 for a unit. It may look like a huge immobile iPhone, but it has not only a wow...

Like Us, Personalized Medicine is More than Its Genes

By MICHAEL MILLENSON For those familiar with the famous Gartner Hype Cycle, the page one New York Times headline, “Genes Show Limited Value in Predicting Diseases” spawned an uncontrollable urge to mark an “x” by the spot where the Peak...

Jay Parkinson, Hello Health & Myca, talks about the new release

By Matthew Holt Myca/Hello Health is launching it's new platform in a special Deep Dive at Health 2.0 Meets Ix, Weds 22nd at 12 noon. Sean Khozin will also be demoing it as part of the "Building Health 2.0 into...

Health 2.0 Meets Ix, and other gossip

By Matthew Holt The Health 2.0 team is in Boston, and we’ve been prepping with our friends from Information Therapy. The Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference is coming up on Wednesday and Thursday 22nd & 23rd April. We have a...

Social insurance is the key & h20tv.com

By Matthew Holt I'm recycling, but today someone asked me what I think we should do about health care reform. Funnily enough, we’re running a new(ish) series on h20tv.com in which anyone can give their 60–90 second view. Mine is...

The Public Plan--Mutual Assured Destruction?

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI I typically don’t talk about my travels on this blog but something happened this week that bears reporting. Whether the federal government should or should not offer a public health plan alternative to compete with private insurers...

Following the Science To A New Era In Medicine

By WILLIAM BESTERMANN, MD "The current care systems cannot do the job. Trying harder will not work. Changing systems of care will." Crossing the Quality Chasm, Institute of Medicine, 2001 Medical leadership in the United States has not yet come...

Op-Ed: Dropping Cancer Death Rates and the Role of Radiation Therapy

By ROCK MACKIE PhD Radiation therapy is the most overlooked of cancer therapies. While attention has primarily been given to chemotherapy and immunotherapy, the truth is that for every 100 people who survive cancer, about 50 can principally thank surgery,...

Rich Noffsinger, AnvitaHealth

By Matthew Holt AnvitaHealth, recently changed its name from SafeMed. It's been one of the more interesting companies using its technology to personalize drug interaction and guideline data to individuals based on their clinical data. Why the name change and...

NaviNet (nee NaviMedix) explains all

So now I really am playing catch up from last week at WHCC and the week before at HIMSS. At both places was (appropriately enough) a company that connects health plans and providers. Like AnvitaHealth it too has changed it's...

An Economics Lesson From Erectile Drugs

By MICHAEL MILLENSON The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that hospital and pharmaceutical companies have been pushing through large price increases in the first quarter of 2009 even as most businesses struggle just to stay above water. (And later Wednesday,...

X-Prize Foundation CEO Dr. Peter Diamandis

By MATTHEW HOLT The X-PRIZE Foundation has generated a lot of attention recently by awarding substantial prizes designed to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in areas from genomics to space travel. Earlier this week X-Prize announced they are extending the model...

Participatory Democracy, Participatory Medicine

By SUSANNAH FOX The following is a guest post from Susannah Fox Associate Director, Digital Strategy Pew Internet. This is part of a continuing series of blog entries cross-posted here, on the Center for Information Therapy Blog, and the Health...

The Biggest Health Care Controversy on the Hill

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Since when was a two-tiered health insurance system a Democratic policy goal? Among Democrats in the Congress and at the White House there is a great deal of interest in creating a government-run health plan in the...

Interview: Microsoft Health Solutions

By MATTHEW HOLT Microsoft Health Solutions Group were one of the more interesting interviews I did at HIMSS. Here, Chris Sullivan & Randy Fusco from Microsoft Health Solutions talk about what they're doing with Amalga (their provider solution) and HealthVault...

For the skeptics who think Health 2.0 tools don't matter...

By Matthew Holt Read this

Next Generation Healthcare Analytics

By DEB BRADLEY Medical claims, pharmacy claims, lab values, HRAs, genetic markers, biometrics – the abundance of data is having an immediate impact on how analytics shape healthcare. Next generation analytics are bringing attention to health and wellness rather than...

The Doctor Is In and Logged On.

By RAHUL PARIKH Wow. I've just taken care of three patients in 12 minutes, and I didn't do it by "churning" them through my office as if it's some sort of factory assembly line. Rather, those patients (their parents, more...

American Well bags BCBS Minnesota

By Matthew Holt American Well, who were big stars at (and sponsors of) the recent Health 2.0 Hawaii symposium have announced the second big Blues to sign on to use their service. It's Blues of Minnesota, who Health 2.0 watchers...

The Path of Five Fallacies

By ROGER COLLIER No, it’s not one of those Chinese operas from the Chairman Mao years, but rather my reaction to a recent report from the prestigious Commonwealth Fund. “The Path to a High Performance US Health System,” and its...

Herzlinger--Enthoven was right all along

By Matthew Holt In a blog piece called Why Republicans Should Back Universal Health Care Regina Herzlinger says something that I more or less agree with. Switzerland's system isn't a bad option. Neither for that matter is Holland's. Now of...