The Health Care Blog

Time to put aside the intellectual disputes for now

By Matthew Holt It’s always fun to see my friends beating each other up in public....and if you read down in the comments on the post published yesterday you’ll see a significant dispute between Maggie Mahar and the Klepper/Kibbe/Lazsweski/Enthoven team...

Saving Health Care, Saving America

By BRIAN KLEPPER, DAVID C. KIBBE, ROBERT LASZEWSKI and ALAIN ENTHOVEN So far, Congress' response to the health care crisis has been alarmingly disappointing in three ways. First, by willingly accepting enormous sums from health care special interests, our representatives...

CMS Reinstates Paying for Avastin Used Off-Label for Macular Degeneration

MERRILL GOOZNER Medicare has reinstated payment codes for eye specialists who use Genentech's Avastin to treat wet macular degeneration. A tiny amount of Avastin, which is sold for cancer treatments, successfully treats the condition at about $100 per shot. Genentech...

Atul Gofigure: Why McAllen Should Have Mattered in the Health Reform Debate

By JEFF GOLDSMITH Back in June, Atul Gawande, a Harvard trained surgeon, published a riveting article in the New Yorker about the physician community in McAllen Texas. If ever an article was strategically timed to influence the nation’s health policy...

A Bill of Rights for Health Care Reform

By KIM BELLARD Our nation's Founders created a pretty good system of government by starting from what they wanted to achieve, exemplified by the Bill of Rights, so perhaps we would be wise to base health care reform on a...

A Message to America's Physicians: Purchasing EHR Technology A Shaky State of Affairs

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER Much of the conversation and debate about physician EHR adoption has centered on the single issue of the (high) cost of purchase. However, we'd like to suggest that the situation is much more...

Senate Health Care Reform: Two Huge Problems, One Giant Red Herring

By ROGER COLLIER Pity poor Senator Harry Reid. Not only is he facing an uphill reelection fight in Nevada, but as Majority Leader, he must reconcile the health care reform bills from the Finance and the Health, Education, Labor and...

Commentology

Jeff Goldsmith writes: As you may know if you've read my postings, I'm an outspoken advocate of tightening Medicare fraud and abuse laws. There will be a post on this in a day or two. It's actually the stuff that's...

Glen Tullman on EMRs, life, the universe and everything

By Matthew Holt A couple of weeks back Allscripts' CEO Glen Tullman was on the Cats & Dogs panel at Health 2.0 and he said some pretty controversial things about the state of EMR adoption (yes it was happening), certification...

The Business of Prostate Cancer: Putting Profit before Patients

By Dr. Anthony H. Horan During my 30+ years as a board-certified urologist I’ve seen quite a bit of suffering, much of it needless, in my opinion. In my work both in private practice and with the VA in Fresno,...

What's got lost in the public option kerfuffle

By Matthew Holt Not so long ago, July this year in fact, PhRMA boss and former Dem Blue Dog & Republican Billy Tauzin told the Aspen Health Forum that a straw poll of Democrats at dinner with him in DC...

THCB Update

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Is Healthcare IT Ready for its Big Coming Out Party?

By BOB WACHTER In 2001, when my colleagues and I ranked nearly 100 patient safety practices on the strength of their supporting evidence (for an AHRQ report), healthcare IT didn’t make the top 25. We took a lot of heat...

Health 2.0: Beneath the Hype, There's Cause for Real Hope

By MICHAEL MILLENSON Health 2.0 is a trend accompanied by both buzz and buzzwords. That worries some advocates for the poor, underserved and just plain old and sick. Will those groups be left behind in the latest information revolution? The...

Protest Music at AHIP meeting

By Matthew Holt This is much more fun and better sung than traditional protests! And given that AHIP would benefit from a public option, I suspect Karen Ignagni hired them. It looks like it happened in the closing session of...

Regina Holliday: Fred's life & death at 73 cents a page

By Matthew Holt If you ever wonder why the efforts to make it easier for patients and families to get information and be treated as equals in their care by the medical care system matter.... If you need convincing that...

State of Health Care Quality: Some States Better Than Others

By Margaret E. O'Kane, President National Committee For Quality Assurance Peggy O'Kane has been running the NCQA for longer than she might care to remember. NCQA is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the quality of health...

Health 2.0 Tools: The power of Twitter

By Matthew Holt The power of Twitter is real kids, and not for what you think. Used properly Twitter is an information filter. Exhibit A is what happened to the Von Schwebers who run PHARMASurveyor. They were a huge part...

Health 2.0 - The Consumer Aggregators

Featuring: Roni Zeiger MD, Product Manager, Google Health, Wayne Gattinella, CEO WebMD, David Cerino, Microsoft Health Solutions Moderator: Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Think-Health Overview: With consumers turning to online sources in record numbers, competition is heating up between the giants in the...

Hiding In Plain Sight: Using Medicare To Solve The ‘Public Option’ Conundrum

By JEFF GOLDSMITH As Senate and House Committee versions of health reform move toward unified legislation and floor votes, the most complex political challenge is how to resolve the “public option” controversy. While one would have thought weightier issues such...

Who should tell your MD what to do?

By PAUL LEVY In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Norbert Gleicher suggests that expert panels won't improve health care because the the quality of the research on which they would base their physician practice guidelines is not reliable. Instead, he...

JSK & Joe DeLuca on KQED

By Matthew Holt One of the best local talk shows anywhere is Michael Krasny's Forum on 88.5 KQED, San Francisco's establishment NPR station (SF of course has a rebel NPR station KALW which has had me on a couple of...

Open Letter to Athena: Open Up the Afterburners!

By SCOTT SHREEVE Afterburner (af·tər′bər·nər) n. A device for augmenting the thrust of a jet engine by burning additional fuel in the uncombined oxygen in the gases from the turbine The augmentation of thrust obtained by afterburning may be well...

The Republican health care argument

By Matthew Holt Just in case you thought we’d gone soft by featuring Sarah Palin, here’s what Tom Toles thinks (from the WaPo)

Last Chance to Fix the Exchanges

By BILL KRAMER We all know that well-designed health insurance exchanges are a critical element for good health reform, right? And we also hear that exchanges are part of all five reform bills in Congress, so we should be satisfied,...

On Stage at Health 2.0: The Cats and Dogs of Health IT

By Matthew Holt Here's the first in a series of videos from the Health 2.0 Conference a couple of weeks back that we're going to feature on THCB. This was the last panel of the day and it featured three...

Docs Wash Hands Like Guys In Gas Station Bathroom

By MICHAEL MILLENSON OK, a new study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine did not directly compare how often someone washes their hands after using a gas station bathroom and how often your doctor washes his hands...

Good Intentions Aren't Enough with Health Care Reform

By SARAH PALIN Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's widely publicized comments on death panels and rationing this August were among the opening shots of an unprecedented national fight over health care reform. At the time, few sober analysts would have...

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Healthcare Fighting (Kung Fu Mix)

Silly Season: Monty Python Policy Making

By IAN MORRISON Editor's Note: Ian Morrison today makes his first contribution to THCB. Ian was President of Institute for the Future where I learned my health care consulting trade in the 1990s. A more amusing boss one couldn't have...

Change The Rules and Get Your Labs

By Phil Marshall In 1999 Caresoft developed a consumer web portal called the Daily Apple. The Daily Apple wasn’t all that unique or different than other health portals, until in May of 2000 they began helping consumers download their lab...

A Crucial Requirement To Cure U.S. Healthcare Long-Term: Curb Raging Inflation

By Albert Waxman, Ph.D, CEO and Senior Managing Member of Psilos Group The Senate Finance Committee pushed the likelihood of mandatory U.S. healthcare insurance a giant step forward this week by passing a healthcare reform bill that is likely to...

Why AHIP needs the public option

By Matthew Holt It’s been a fun week. After years of THCB explaining that neither could AHIP do genuine research nor could its venerable President open her mouth without lying, the rest of the world has caught on. I won’t...

Health Care Reform Lite

By J.D. KLEINKE “The only constant in health care is change.” It’s one of those shop-worn things you hear too often on health care’s rubber-chicken circuit; and not only is it not true, but it is exactly untrue. The only...

Two east coast conferences worth a look

By Matthew Holt Two conferences I won’t be at (because I’ve been on enough aeroplanes this year already and have to do a bunch more traveling in November) are later this month. One is GelHealth in NYC which is the...

Health 2.0 and the Big Bang

By GLENN LAFFEL It’s hard to believe that last week’s Health 2.0 conference was just the third annual installment of the event. The phrase, “Health 2.0” entered our lexicon at light speed and seems to have been there longer than...

Why Standards Matter 2: Health IT Enters a New Era of Regulatory Control

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER The recent history of electronic medical records in ambulatory care, or what we now call EHR (electronic health record) technology, can be divided roughly into three phases. Phase I, which lasted approximately 20...

What’s Next? Follow the Money

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI With the passage of the Senate Finance bill the health care effort now moves to a critical stage with the Senate Majority Leader and the House Speaker now clearly in charge. The more important effort will be...

Why is this the one thing?

By JOE FLOWER When the terrorist attacks of 9/11 hit the United States, and then suddenly we were plunged into war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, I don’t remember anyone demanding that the wars be “deficit neutral.” No...

Will We Get a Health Care Bill in 2009?

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI It’s decision time. The Congress will or won’t pass a major health care bill during the next few weeks. Will we get health care reform in 2009? Almost certainly not. As I have been saying for months,...

Physician Accountability for Violation of Safety Rules: The Time For Excuses Has Passed

By BOB WACHTER In a recent New England Journal, Peter Pronovost and I make the case for striking a new balance between “no blame” and accountability. Come on folks, it’s time. At most hospitals, hand hygiene rates hover between 30-70%,...

Ur Doin It Wrong

By CINDY THROOP Susannah Fox aptly illustrated what is happening in health care during the 'The Patient Is In' panel of the Health 2.0 conference with some amusing LOLCat pictures captioned "ur doin it wrong." Put simply, when it comes...

Obama Administration CTO Aneesh Chopra at Health 2.0

Shutting Down Social Media? Not Here.

By PAUL LEVY Paul Levy is the President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center in Boston. He blogs about his experiences at Running a Hospital, one of the few blogs we know of maintained by a senior hospital...

Around the Web in 60 Seconds: Health 2.0 San Francisco

All Things Digital "Keas' Adam Bosworth speaks about new health care startup" by Kara Swisher Fast Company "The Future of Healthcare is Social" Forbes "Must Read Health Blogs" Official Google Blog "Fall update on Google Health" NY Times.com "A White...

Op-Ed: Our Misplaced Faith in High-Tech Medicine

By MERRILL GOOZNER The following essay appeared on the website of the Hastings Center, which is running a colloquium on the values behind health care reform. "One could make a good case that improvements in education and job creation could...

Smoking and mental illness

By Maggie Mahar At last weeks Health 2.0 Conference Maggie Mahar, author of HealthBeatBlog got more than a little feisty about Al Waxman's suggestion that we make people with bad health behaviors pay more. She said that 95% of smokers...

The Senate Finance Health Bill Has No Clothes

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Readers of this blog know that I have lots of concerns for the Senate Finance health bill primarily because it does not so much represent health care reform as just an expensive entitlement expansion. Readers also know...

Cool Technology of the Week

By JOHN HALAMKA In many crime solving police procedural programs (NCIS, CSI, Criminal Minds etc), the perpetrator has used an untraceable, disposable cell phone. But what is a disposable cell phone and where do you buy one? I've never seen...