The Health Care Blog

So Much For Comparative Effectiveness

By MERRILL GOOZNER The Obama administration's commitment to cost control in health care can now be summed up in four words: Not on our watch. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told American women this week that they have...

So will the public option hurt hospitals? Not in the Ozarks

By Matthew Holt I've had this sitting in my inbox a while, but I thought that with the Senate bill out it was time to have a bit of weekend fun with it. The topic is the fear that a...

This Just In

By ARON BOROS Yesterday, but the U.S. Treatment Services Task Force announced that leeches aren't a particularly good treatment for most ailments. While noting that leeches might still be useful for certain specific circulation disorders, the USTSTF recommended against their...

Harvard Study Gets it Wrong on EHRs and Quality

By GLENN LAFFEL MD, PhD America’s hospitals are a triumph of modernity, stocked as they are with PET scanners, ECMO machines, and ICUs bedecked in eye-popping gadgetry. They are also the most complex organizations ever created by man. The seemingly...

Sell Patients like Baseball Players - Seriously

By JOE FLOWER Here's a health care reform strategy that I have not heard anywhere else. Think about this: Why aren't health plans more aggressive in promoting the long-term health of their members, like getting them to eat better, stop...

Organ Donors Shouldn't Be Penalized

By KATHIE McCLURE It can be challenging to find an organ donor for someone who needs a transplant. But when a donor and desperately sick person are matched up, living donors should not be "punished" for their gift, especially by...

The Health Internet vs. the NHIN -- A Matter of Control, Cost, and Timing

By DAVID C. KIBBE and BRIAN KLEPPER There is growing tension within the Obama administration's health team over who will control health data exchange: everyone (including consumers and their doctors), or just large provider organizations. The public debate will be...

Practice Fusion throws its hat in the consumer ring

By Matthew Holt Practice Fusion has been making a fair bit of noise recently with its investment from Salesforce and its trumpeting of 18,000 + physician users. If that number is true it probably makes it the most used EMR...

The Outlook for a Health Reform Bill in 2009

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Readers know of my yearlong pessimism over our getting a trillion dollar health care bill in 2009. With the historic passage of the House bill, are we now on our way to a big health care bill...

Extormity launches WHIO to compete with Health Internet

Electronic health records vendor Extormity, seeking to establish itself as the dominant force in the healthcare IT space, is launching its World Health Information Organization or WHIO platform at a public launch event in Brussels. “WHIO is like a mega-RHIO...

Controlling Health Care Costs: How to “Bend the Curve”

By STEPHEN SHORTELL, PHD, MPH, MBA As Congress nears passage of the first substantial health care reform in decades, there is an ominous challenge: No reform will be sustainable unless we slow the rapid growth of health care spending. Health...

"The possible" vs "what we want," resumed

By Matthew Holt Not so long ago (actually less than 2 weeks), there was quite the spat on THCB between the Four Horseman (Klepper, Kibbe, Lazewski & Enthoven) and Maggie Mahar. Essentially it came down to this question: Is there...

Spotlight on Health 2.0: In The Doctors Office, from SF 2009

Every week we bring you a new video from Health 2.0! This week we're featuring Health 2.0 In the Doctors Office, a special showcase featuring physician-facing tools and services from the recent Fall conference in San Francisco. To see more...

Health Reform: Measurables and Immeasurables

By RICHARD REECE, MD "Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be measured." - Dennis Prager, 1948 - radio host, lecturer,...

Conspiracy theory Friday (FDA & CCHIT related)

By Matthew Holt Two fun things—First, Mark Leavitt says he’s quitting CCHIT in March. He says that he’ll be 60 then and wants to go do other stuff. Of course the cynics among you will say that he’s had enough...

Will Business Force Reform Back To The Drawing Board?

By BRIAN KLEPPER and DAVID C. KIBBE Until now, non-health care business has been noticeably absent from the health care reform proceedings , and quiet about the bills' impacts on their management of employee benefits, on cost, and on the...

Abortion Coverage Is About Math As Well As Politics

By AL LEWIS Let us start by acknowledging that those who think abortion is a sin must be respected, and not forced into a risk pool that covers abortion. Let us also acknowledge that those who are pro-choice need to...

The FDA Steps In: Regulating Prescription Drug Promotion on the Internet

By KATE GREENWOOD The FDA has been widely criticized for not providing guidance for drug companies eager to promote their products on the internet. Earlier this year, the FDA expressed the view that the message was what was important, not...

Regina Holliday's mural for Fred

By Matthew Holt Regina’s story has been on THCB before—Fred’s Life & Death at 73 cents a page. But you may not have seen the mural. (From NPR)

Pay (Only) for Health Care that Works

Charles Silver & David A. Hyman Health care is expensive partly because governmental payers and insurers foot the bill for large quantities of medical services that are ineffective, unnecessary, or unproven. According to a RAND report, studies of clinical efficiency...

The Best Health Care Idea All Year

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Out of almost nowhere has come momentum for a proposal to create a bipartisan entitlement and tax commission to draft proposals to control the long-term costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The idea would require the...

Medicare’s Biggest Change in 40 Years on the Horizon?

By Vince Kuraitis Earlier this week CMS issued a typically cryptic Announcement indicating that they were shelving the Medicare Medical Home Demonstration (MMHD) and instead would focus on the recently announced Multi-Payer Advanced Primary Care Initiative (MAPCI). My blog post...

Dave Durenberger on Lieberman

By Matthew Holt Former Minnesota Senator Dave Durenberger, a thinking centrist Republican (remember them?) puts out an occasional newsletter full of gems. This is today’s zinger: The Senate has a better bill than the House, but it also has a...

Intermountain Healthcare -- Proof That U.S. Hospitals Can Improve

By MAGGIE MAHAR I urge everyone to read this story by David Leonhardt in this Sunday’s (November 8) New York Times. (Thanks to HealthBeat reader Lisa Lindel for spotting it. ) Leonhardt profiles Intermountain Healthcare, a network of hospitals and...

Certification versus Meaningful Use

By John Halamka Recently, clinicians have asked me "why should I implement my organization's preferred EHR when I've found a less expensive vendor that promises meaningful use?" This illustrates a basic misunderstanding of the difference between Certification and Meaningful Use....

The Federated Health System of America

By GLENN LAFFEL After a spy plane confirmed the Soviet Union was building launch platforms for first-strike ballistic missiles in Cuba in October, 1962, President John F. Kennedy convened his Joint Chiefs of Staff and cabinet members to help him...

Spotlight on Health 2.0: The Patient Is In, from SF 2009

Every week we bring you a new video from Health 2.0! This week we're featuring The Patient is In, a session focusing on how Health 2.0 tools are making a difference for patients. To see more videos from past Health...

Where were you?

By MICHAEL PAINTER, Senior Program Officer - Robert Wood Johnson Foundation I distinctly remember the first time I heard the title, “National Coordinator for Health Information Technology”. It was 2004. That’s, of course, the year that RAND released its important...

Tell the FDA the whole story, please

By SUSANNAH FOX I scan menus for keywords (fig, parsnips, salmon...) and it turns out I scan Twitter the same way, looking for anyone who is talking about my favorite topics (data, consumers, information quality...) So when I saw Jonathan...

Are We Too Small to Succeed?

By DON LINDSTROM The logic behind the government bailouts in the financial and automobile industries goes like this: some institutions are so large and interconnected that their failure could collapse the entire economy. They are considered to be too big...

Modest step in the reform journey shows the idiocy of our political system

By Matthew Holt It does seem to take a health care bill to remind us all how incredibly screwed up the political process is in these here United States. The Medicare Modernization Act was railroaded through by Tom Delay and...

We the Consumers

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE There has been much talk lately about the Consumer movement in health care. The health insurance industry has given us the Consumer Driven Health Care (CDHC), which has gained much traction in the marketplace in the form...

Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Health Care Debate

By Greg Rienzi, Staff writer for the Johns Hopkins Gazette While concepts for health care reform volley back and forth in Washington, D.C., and around the nation, Johns Hopkins has quietly but meaningfully injected itself into the debate. Johns Hopkins...

Op-Ed: Why "free market competition" fails in health care

By JOE FLOWER In trying to think about the future of health care, thoughtful, intelligent people often ask, “Why can’t we just let the free market operate in health care? That would drive down costs and drive up quality.” They...

Back to Basics: Toward a Core Set of Relevant and Portable Personal Health Information

By DAVID C. KIBBE In the cacophony of health IT issues, products, and goals that compete every day for our attention, it is easy to lose sight of the profound value that could come from the universal availability of a...

Health 2.0 and AccessDNA

Each year at Health 2.0, we present Launch!, a debut of new products and services to the Health 2.0 community. This year we were able to hear from many great companies, including AccessDNA, a new site that generates personalized genetics...

On the road--ACHE Social Media, NCI, Healthcamp NYC, Blogging networking LA

By Matthew Holt My time off for good behavior is at an end and today I get back on a plane for four fun conferences and a party. Wednesday I’m keynoting the ACHE Social Media in Healthcare meeting in San...

Spotlight on Health 2.0: Launch! from SF 2009

Every week we'll be bringing you a new video from Health 2.0! This week we're featuring Launch!, an introduction of new tools and services to the Health 2.0 community. To see more videos from past Health 2.0 conferences, or to...

A “Third School” of Cost Containment?

By BILL KRAMER Is there a “Third School” of reformers that could help us resolve the long debate about how to contain health care spending? Drew Altman’s recent column describes the history of the debate between the “Regulators” and the...