The Health Care Blog

Death to Innovators – The Tragedy of Healthcare Innovation

By SCOTT SHREEVE Tragedy A disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life A tragic aspect or element. A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially...

CER Council requests public comment

The Federal Comparative Effectiveness Research Coordination Council has posted its draft definition of comparative effectiveness research and the draft criteria for research prioritization at http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/cer/draftdefinition.html for public review and comment.

Cool Technology of the Week

By JOHN HALAMKA In my recent blog about the Red Flags rule, GreenLeaves commented that biometric checking would help reduce errors by establishing identity and uncovering fraud. Using biometrics to verify identity seems like a good idea, so I met...

Cal Blue Shield wins recision case, but it's very, very strange

By Matthew Holt So Blue Shield of California wins the first case it’s fighting over the recission issue. But it’s in very strange circumstances. The plaintiffs (a couple trying to get coverage for a doctor they like that wasn't in...

Calendar: Tufts Summer Institute on Web Strategies for Health Communication

What do millions of people do online and why does this matter to healthcare? That question, and many related ones about how to take advantage of the Web for health communication, will be answered in a new course offered by...

Helping Each Other Take Care of Each Other

By STEVE ADAMS How many billions of dollars in volunteer health care services are donated in this country? How can HIT stimulus dollars help to provide development of businesses or business models that provide an economic multiplier effect to the...

Workers Ungrateful for Empowerment to Pay More

By MICHAEL MILLENSON American workers sure are ungrateful. A new report by the National Business Group on Health (NBGH) says that 27 percent of insured workers are skipping health care treatments to avoid co-payments, 20 percent of employees are not...

The Great $2 Billion Cost Cut "Promise" Meets Another Obstacle

By ROGER COLLIER It turns out that the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical organizations who announced with great fanfare a couple of weeks ago their plan to cut/maybe think about cutting* $2 trillion/maybe nothing* from their costs may have been even...

Raising Legitimate Questions and Concerns About Health IT Certification, Without Getting Personal

By DAVID C. KIBBE In a recent blog post on THCB, Mark Leavitt wrote this about me: "[Dr. Kibbe's] repeated use of falsehoods and innuendo to attack CCHIT have found an audience in the national media, reaching a level that...

What's good for General Motors is good for America

By Matthew Holt In 1953, Charles Erwin Wilson, then GM president, was named by Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. When he was asked during the hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee if as secretary of defense he could make...

Certifying Health IT: Let’s Set the (Electronic Health) Record Straight

By MARK LEAVITT The Stimulus bill catapulted health IT – previously the domain of clinicians with a passion for applying technology to improve healthcare – onto the national stage. When you inject billions of taxpayer dollars, politics inevitably comes with...

X PRIZE Blog Rally: $10M for Health Care Innovators

By THCB STAFF Scott Shreeve, MD, Senior Health Advisor at The X Prize Foundation and frequent THCB contributor, has asked the health care blogosphere to take part in this blog rally in order to raise awareness about the Healthcare X...

I'm not sure that's how Uwe meant it!

By Matthew Holt The AP has a puff piece on the greatness of Karen Ignagni. Well greatness if greatness is defined as doing anything it takes to screw the nation on behalf of her organization’s members, all the while telling...

Money-Driven Medicine—N.Y. Premiere of Film, June 11

By MAGGIE MAHAR At last, Money-Driven Medicine is finished. This 90-minute documentary was produced by Alex Gibney, best known for his 2005 film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and his 2007 Academy Award Winning documentary, Taxi to the...

Thomas Kuhn, Health Care Reform and Vascular Disease

By WILLIAM BESTERMANN The puzzle of improving care and reducing costs in American medicine and in vascular conditions (that is, diseases associated with blood vessel metabolism) in particular - these are responsible for 60 percent of all cost - has...

Sword-swallowing and health care?

By Matthew Holt I have no idea why this was at HealthcampNashville today, but here’s sword swallower Dan Meyer swallowing a huge sword with change:healthcare’s Chris Parks removing it! More tweets from HealthcampNashville here

Beyond Wikipedia

By NAOMI FREUNDLICH No surprise, these days more and more doctors are searching online for medical information. What is surprising, however, is that in a recent study, nearly 50% of physicians indicated that they use Wikipedia—the open-access encyclopedia that allows...

How to Waste a Boatload of ARRA Money

By CINDY THROOP I want to take a moment to make sure we are all on the same page here with the business of health care reform. This is inanely simple. When it comes to health care, keep doing things...

Bringing Patients into the Health IT Conversation About "Meaningful Use"

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER The Obama health team at HHS and ONC are gradually establishing the rules that will determine how approximately $34 billion in ARRA/HITECH funds are spent on health IT over the next several years....

Healthcare IT Checkup

Web-based Tool Equips Healthcare IT Professionals with a National Benchmark on Clinical Application and IT Infrastructure Investment CDW Healthcare, part of the public sector subsidiary of CDW Corporation and a leading provider of technology products and services to healthcare organizations,...

AMA Manual of Style is Now Online

Oxford University Press is proud to present the launch of the online version of AMA Manual of Style (launching June 2009), an essential tool for everyone involved in medical or scientific publishing. The online version is written and updated by...

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Op-Ed: The True Measures of a “Good Doctor”

By CHRISTOPHER J. WHITE, MD, FSCAI Measuring patient outcomes is one way to determine how “good” a doctor is – but it is far from the only way. In our obsession with measuring performance, we seem to have forgotten that....

Directus - Create your own CME with the sources you trust

Whether you spend a few minutes or an hour researching online, Directus is the most straight forward way earn AMA/PRA Category 1 Credits™ for your efforts. Wherever your research is focused - from drug protocols to patient symptoms to medical...

5th Annual Games for Health Conference 2009 in Boston, June 11-12

The 5th Annual Games for Health Conference 2009 in Boston, Massachusetts on June 11-12 is closing in. REGISTER NOW! at http://www.regonline.com/gfh2009 You can still register for $499.00 for the core conference and $599.00 for the conference+pre-conference events. You can receive...

The Cost of Health Reform - $1.5 Trillion or ... ?

By ROGER COLLIER Putting the political cart firmly before the horse, the Senate Finance Committee heard testimony last week on how to pay for reform—before they had reliable estimates of how much it is likely to cost. It’s not that...

PHR Evolution

By JOSH SEIDMAN I participated in a personal health record (PHR) workshop yesterday hosted by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). CDT’s goal was to gain input from a wide array of stakeholders (an impressive collection of about 40...

Unlikely conversation partners

By Matthew Holt Do you want to see me and Regina Herzlinger in conversation together? You can sort of do that here. The Center for Connected Health (the Partners guys) had a conversation which was supposed to be three people...

The Red Flags Rule

By JOHN HALAMKA You may have seen the recent headlines "FTC delays Red Flags Rule implementation until August 2009". What is the Red Flags Rule and how does it relate to healthcare? The FTC has a great website that it...

More on HITECH , Microsoft mea culpas, Google, et al

By Matthew Holt I draw your attention to a troika of articles, all of which show how things can be slightly misinterpreted. First, who knew that Blackford Middleton was either the most influential health policy wonk out there, or single-handedly...

Disgusting, and another reason why marriage needs to be re-defined

By Matthew Holt Tara Parker-Pope reveals two cases where discrimination kept a partner, and in one case the dying woman’s children, away from their loved one while they were dying in hospital. One hospital involved is Jackson Memorial in Miami,...

McKinsey weighs in on healthcare reform

By CHARLIE BAKERCharlie Baker is the president and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., a nonprofit health plan that covers more than 1 million New Englanders. Baker blogs regularly at Let's Talk Health Care. Back in December, 2008, the...

Health Care Leaders Say Obama Overstated Their Promise to Control Costs

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI That was the headline in Thursday's New York Times regarding Monday's promise by health care stakeholders to reduce spending by $2 trillion. A couple of snipets from the Times article: Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that...

Reconciliation -- or War?

By ROGER COLLIER Reconciliation. It’s an odd word for something that could precipitate a knock-down, drag-out fight in Congress, but the process that Senate Democrats agreed last week to adopt if health care reform legislation isn’t passed by October 15...

Marketplace

Interested in reaching a national monthly audience of 75,000 healthcare-obsessed readers? Drop us a line. We'll get back to you with rates and options. Want to impress your boss and amaze your friends? Consider becoming a THCB corporate supporter. Calendar:...

Octomum gives Kaiser a bellyache

By Matthew Holt First KP somehow gets landed with the Octomum, whom they most surely didn't provided with the IVF in the first place. My assumption is that the multiple birth cost them into the middling 6 figures. Now because...

SharpBrains Releases 2009 Market Report

SharpBrains is pleased to announce the release of The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2009 report, their second annual comprehensive market analysis of the US market for computerized cognitive assessment and training tools. Designed for decision-makers at healthcare,...

Connecting finance to coverage

By Matthew Holt Repeating his message that Health Costs Are the Real Deficit Threat OMB Director Peter Orszag goes into the not exactly friendly territory of the WSJ Opinion pages and explains that practice variation is unnecessary and wasteful, comparative...

UPDATE from the FRESH-Thinking Capstone Conference

By TEAL PENNEBAKER In the same week that the Obama Administration has stated its commitment to overhauling the health care system, the FRESH-Thinking Capstone Conference adjourned yesterday morning to discuss next steps in health care reform. The event is a...

Should Health Care Standards be Open Source?

By ALAN VIARS Recently there has been some chatter on Twitter about health standards and open source, so I thought I would write a little commentary on the topic. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I am huge fan...

The Chronic Pain Educational Educational Workshop in Berkeley, CA - July 19th, 2009

In the spirit of Health 2.0 and User Generated health Care we are proud to announce: “The Chronic Pain Educational Educational Workshop" July 19th, 2009 - 12:00P.M - 7:00P.M - Reception 7:00P.M - 8:00P.M Chronic pain is the 21st century’s...

Op-Ed: Leave it to Darwin?

By ROGER COLLIER I’ve been reading some of the testimony on delivery system reforms from the House Ways and Means Committee meeting earlier this month, in particular the lengthy statements from MedPAC Chairman Glenn Hackbarth and Urban Institute Senior Fellow...

Connecting value to coverage: a first glimpse

By MICHAEL PAINTER Would you take a virtual walk with me across the Dartmouth Atlas map on RWJF's web site? Just follow the link. Now, move your cursor first over, say, anywhere in Minnesota. There, you'll see that 2006 Medicare...

The Two Trillion Dollar Promise: Can We Trust It?

By BILL KRAMER President Obama described it as a “watershed” in the journey toward comprehensive health reform – and it might very well be. But many people are suspicious of the health industry leaders who promised to slow the trend...

Vaccine refusal, or Jenny McCarthy, better with fewer clothes on

By Matthew Holt Kaiser Permanente has released a study from its EMR database looking at use of vaccines in its Colorado region. KP in Colorado has data on about 480,000 members dating back to the mid-1990s from when they started...

TV stardom (well, sorta...)

By Matthew Holt It’s just possible that you weren’t glued to the France24 cable channel (yes there is a French 24 hour news & chat channel broadcast in English). Well yesterday they had a “debate” about healthcare hosted by the...

Beware the Bursting of the Health Care Bubble

By GEORGE LUNDBERG The good news is that if and when the American healthcare bubble bursts, some value will remain. The bad news is that the annual appropriate value could actually be only about 60% of the current expenditure. The...

Humor: Voluntary Cost Control? Never Mind!

By MICHAEL MILLENSON Health Care Stocks Hurt as “Promise” Spooks Investors NEW YORK – Major health care stocks plunged today as investors worried that a series of voluntary actions the industry pledged in order to control costs represented a serious...

Me & Mr Jones, (Jr.)

By Matthew Holt I met Leroy Jones at Health 2.0 Meets Ix in Boston. He runs the Technical Jones web site, and is a veteran of both sides of DC politics (inside and outside of Capitol Hill and the White...

Healthcare as a Complex Adaptive System - Part 2: Eight Points

By JOE FLOWER We can actually say what a better healthcare system would look like, if we look at healthcare in the United States as a complex adaptive system stuck in a Nash equilibrium. The ideal reformed healthcare system would...