I worked in the health insurance industry for a long time. I helped introduce consumer-driven/high deductible plans to help foster cost-awareness. I bought into the protection-against-big-expenses meme. I personally have never not had health insurance. So, by most standards, I should be biased in its favor. But I'm beginning to wonder if health insurance itself is the problem, or at least a big part of the problem. I've written before about some of the new entrants into health insurance; more power to them, and the more the merrier. What I continue to be disappointed by is that we're not really seeing fundamentally new approaches to what health insurance is.
Health Affairs
See the following -
"What Systems Work In Healthcare And Why?" Is Focus Of 19th Annual Health Policy Conference
Press Release |
ECRI Institute |
November 2, 2012
Today’s healthcare systems face escalating challenges as they aggregate into larger and more complex health systems that are vertically and horizontally integrated. The trend is being driven by both business conditions and new government policies. But are the new systems producing better clinical and business outcomes? Read More »
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A Resurrection For Hippocratic Medicine?
Arvind Cavale | Rebel.MD | August 25, 2014
...Just a few days ago, a paper by Casalino et al, in the journal Health Affairs clearly showed that compared to practices with 10–19 physicians, practices with 1–2 physicians had 33 percent fewer preventable admissions, and practices with 3–9 physicians had 27 percent fewer. Physician-owned practices had fewer preventable admissions than hospital-owned practices...
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Applying The Lessons Learned In Other Industries To Health Care
Margalit Gur-Arie | KevinMD.com | May 22, 2014
While grappling with the costs and imperfections of our health care system in recent years, a multitude of experts in the field found it useful and enlightening to compare health care to a variety of more familiar industries, and to suggest that health care should adopt operational models that have been shown to work well in those other industries...
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Blog: Open-source, open government
Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | October 4, 2012
I have to give a hat tip to Facebook friend Peter Groen for pointing me to this fascinating TED lecture by technology guru Clay Shirky. Shirky, who holds several appointments at New York University, has never limited his futuristic gaze to the confines of healthcare, but he is well known among the health IT pundit class.
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CORAnet Solutions Champions Patients’ Medical Record Access with Its Personal Health Information Exchange
By Marc Wine | May 7, 2015
It has been six years since the HITECH Act passed, yet most Americans seeking medical care are still unable to obtain their full medical records for a variety of reasons whether the hospital will not release them or proprietary EHR system vendors will not allow hospitals, let alone patients, direct access. One Healthcare 2.0 leader, CORAnet Solutions, has developed a tool that finally allows patients access to their complete medical records. This new breakthrough technology enables patients to take control of their personal medical data with CORAnet’s Personal Health Information Exchange (PHIE).
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Cost-Saving Plan to Unify Military Medical Services on Hold
Gregg Zoroya | USA Today | January 31, 2012
An idea to unify the medical operations of the Army, Navy and Air Force that researchers say could save a half-billion dollars a year has been shelved at a time when the military is trying to cut nearly half a trillion dollars from its budget.
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EHRs Eating Up Half of Doctors’ Workday, and They Are Not Getting Paid for It
Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | April 5, 2017
Doctors spend about half of their EHR time during patient encounters, according to new findings published in Health Affairs. The other half is consumed by desktop medicine tasks for which they do not get reimbursed... Researchers looked at data captured by electronic health records time-stamp functionality 31 million EHR transactions conducted between 2011-2014 by 471 primary care physicians and 765,129 patient records to measure how doctors spend their time....
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Forget Obamacare: Vermont Wants To Bring Single Payer To America
Sarah Kliff | Vox | April 9, 2014
"If Vermont gets single-payer health care right, which I believe we will, other states will follow," Vermont Gov. Shumlin predicted in a recent interview. "If we screw it up, it will set back this effort for a long time.
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Health Affairs Briefing at the National Press Club on Health IT Adoption & Use
By Marc Wine | July 10, 2013
National Coordinator for Health IT, Dr. Farzard Mostashari, delivered the opening remarks at the Health Affairs briefing on trends in the adoption of health information technology held this week at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Sharing 'open data' is prominent among the accumulating good news about the progress being made in adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems across the U.S. Read More »
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Inside The Struggle For Electronic Health Record Interoperability
Greg Otto | FedScoop | August 20, 2014
Over the past few months, stories have popped up chronicling doctors’, clinicians’ or other health care providers’ headaches moving to and/or accessing EHRs. The chorus of complaints has led the Senate Appropriations Committee to submit language in a draft bill that calls for a report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) on what “the challenges and barriers” are to EHR interoperability.” Read More »
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Is Health Insurance Itself the Problem with the System?
By Kim Bellard | January 6, 2016
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Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, And What Can Be Done About It
By James B. Lieber | November 17, 2015
...The following year, researchers shook the profession with an article in Health Affairs entitled “‘Global Trigger Tool’ Shows that Adverse Events in Hospitals May be Ten Times Greater than Previously Measured.” Dr. David Classen, who did the seminal research for global triggers, served as lead author of the study, which looked at three mid-size to large (ranging from 550 to 1,000 beds) teaching hospitals associated with medical schools in the West and Northwest that participated on the condition of anonymity...When different detection methods were applied, global triggers found over 90 percent of events, the government’s Patient Safety Indicators (based on discharge summaries) found 8.5 percent, and voluntary reporting disclosed only 2 percent (afraid of censure and malpractice, doctors and nurses seldom willingly self-accuse). Classen, et al. warned: “reliance on voluntary reporting and the Patient Safety Indicators could produce misleading conclusions about the current safety of care in the U.S. health-care system and misdirect efforts to improve patient safety.”...
Medicare Actuaries: U.S. Healthcare Spending to Soar to $5.631 Trillion and 20.1 Percent of GDP in 2025
Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | July 18, 2016
In their July issue, the editors of Health Affairs published the latest estimates of U.S. healthcare spending, developed and revealed by the actuaries of the federal Medicare program. In an article entitled “National Health Expenditure Projections, 2015-25: Economy, Prices, and Aging Expected To Shape Spending and Enrollment,” the authors, predicted that the percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) spent on healthcare every year across the U.S. healthcare system would grow from 17.5 percent in 2014 to 20.1 percent in 2025 with total spending rising from $3.3013 trillion in 2014 to $5.631 trillion in 2025...
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Not All Snake Oil Is Digital
By Kim Bellard | June 14, 2016
A different take on "snake oil" in health care was a thoughtful piece in Health Affairs, by David Newman and Amanda Frost, discussing the quality measurement morass in health care. They cite a study that estimated we spend some $15.4b annually collecting several thousand different quality measures, few of which have any meaning to consumers and all-too-few of which seem to be used to actively improve quality. It isn't that they don't think we should be measuring quality -- far from it -- but, rather: "Patients should not be able to choose substandard quality care, and substandard quality care should not be allowed to be offered in the market." Now, there's a novel concept!
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Number of Public HIEs Drop, Bringing Viability into Question
Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | July 8, 2016
Despite federal funding that aided their creation, the number of community and state health information exchanges is declining as HIEs struggle to remain financially viable now that seed money has dried up. Those are among the results of a new national survey published in the July issue of Health Affairs that tracked community and state HIE efforts soon after federal funding ended. “We found 106 operational HIE efforts that, as a group, engaged more than one-third of all U.S. providers in 2014,” states the study’s authors...
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