healthcare reform
See the following -
The Fiscal Consequences Of The Affordable Care Act
The view that comprehensive health care reform must make a substantial positive contribution to repairing the federal fiscal outlook was one of the motivating principles underlying the March, 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA as enacted falls well short of that standard and would significantly worsen the federal government’s fiscal position relative to previous law. Read More »
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The ITDotHealth Conference
Today, I participated in the ITDotHealth Conference in Boston, discussing one simple question with a selection of the nation's EHR and PHR experts : How we can best innovate/change our EHRs while also operating them to transact daily patient care? Read More »
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The Promise of Electronic Health Records
Last week, Don Berwick completed his 17 month tenure as administrator of Medicare and Medicaid. The nation should be grateful that such a visionary was at the helm. The nation should be frustrated that he was never confirmed. Read More »
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The Republican Case For Waste In Health Care
Conservatives love to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to government programs—except in health care. In fact, working with drug companies and warning of “death panels,” they slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research. Here’s how that happened, and why it can’t stand. Read More »
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The Sabotage Device Within Obamacare
Much of the March/April issue of the Washington Monthly is about conservative efforts to sabotage key first-term accomplishment of the Obama administration via the regulatory and other implementation processes. Read More »
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The Salaries Of Health Executives: What Can Doctors Do?
... Health care costs in the U.S. remain above those of all other industrialized countries while physician salaries continue to fall. Even though the U.S. spends more dollars per capita on health care than any other country on earth, our outcomes, when compared to other nations, remain mediocre at best...
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The United States Is Worse In Access, Affordability And Insurance Complexity
The United States is in the midst of the most sweeping health insurance expansions and market reforms since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Our 2013 survey of the general population in eleven countries [...] found that US adults were significantly more likely than their counterparts in other countries to forgo care because of cost, to have difficulty paying for care even when insured, and to encounter time-consuming insurance complexity. Read More »
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Three Ways To Improve U.S. Healthcare, As Demonstrated In India
Listening to caregivers from other countries, it's easy to feel exasperated about U.S healthcare. American hospitals are filled with good people trying to do good work, but at every turn the system of misplaced incentives gets in the way of good patient care...
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Ticking All The Boxes For A Health Care Upgrade At Strata Rx
What is needed for successful reform of the health care system? Here’s what we all know: that a data-rich health care future is coming our way. And what it will look like, in large outlines. Health care reformers have learned that no single practice will improve the system. All of the following, which were discussed at O’Reilly’s recent Strata Rx conference, must fall in place. Read More »
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Too Soon to Tell If EHRs Provide Good ROI
There’s been a lot of hoopla about the role of electronic health records in patient safety, Meaningful Use, data sharing and security. But the elephant in the room is always "do EHRs provide a good return on investment? Will EHR users make more money?" It seems, based on recent research, that the answer might be yes. First, there’s the study that EHRs are adept at increasing a provider’s charge capture. By using their EHR’s automation and enhanced coding capability, pediatric primary care physicians saw an $11.49 increase on average, per-patient collections and an $11.09 increase on average, per-patient charges, as well as an improvement in collection ratios...
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U.K. Official Urges U.S. Government To Adopt A Digital Core
When he read about the technical failures plaguing HealthCare.gov, Mike Bracken said it felt like a real-life version of the movie Groundhog Day. During the past decade, the government in the United Kingdom faced a string of public, embarrassing and costly IT failures. Finally, a monster technical fiasco — a failed upgrade for the National Health Service — led to an overhaul of the way the British government approached technology. Read More »
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Universal Healthcare Doesn't Mean Waiting Longer to See A Doctor
A new report from the Commonwealth Fund shows that people in other industrialized nations get doctors' appointments faster than Americans do. Read More »
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US Hospitals Send Hundreds Of Immigrant Patients Back To Home Countries To Curb Cost Of Care
Days after they were badly hurt in a car accident, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana lay unconscious in an Iowa hospital while the American health care system weighed what to do with the two immigrants from Mexico. Read More »
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VA Halts All Software Development
The Veterans Affairs Department halted all software development Tuesday, including work on its $491 million paperless Veterans Benefits Management System. The news came a day after the department furloughed 2,754 information technology employees due to the lapse in appropriations. Read More »
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Want Healthcare.gov To Work? Destroy And Rebuild Federal IT Procurement
The conversation started the first week after healthcare.gov launched. Maybe the problem was federal procurement, not Obamacare. Read More »
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