healthcare system
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Hospital Monopolies: The Biggest Driver of Health Costs That Nobody Talks About
The debate about health-care reform, on both the Left and the Right, revolves almost entirely around changing the way we pay for health care...I agree that changing the way we buy health care is important—I once wrote a 6,400-word magazine article on the subject—but there’s an entire other side to that equation that we completely ignore: changing the way we sell health care. Read More »
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How A Flaw In The ACO Model Leaves Patients Out
While federal legislation focuses on payor / provider synergies, there is nothing in the mandated programs beyond pilot projects or experiments according to the legislative texts. Read More »
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In Rwanda, Health Care Coverage That Eludes the U.S.
Last week’s Supreme Court decision upholding of the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law moves the United States closer to the goal of health coverage for all. All other developed countries have it. But so do some developing nations... Read More »
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Instead of Medicare for All, How about VA for All?
I wonder -- why would people be calling for a new system that would still have thousands of private hospitals/facilities and millions of healthcare professionals, practicing FFS medicine using countless systems and data structures? In short, why aren't people calling for VA for All? Like Medicare, the VA -- more especially, its healthcare component, the Veterans Health Administration -- is charged with providing healthcare to a designed population, in this case, veterans. Unlike Medicare, though, it does so as an integrated health system (by far the largest in the U.S.), with 170 VA Medical Centers, over a thousand outpatient facilities, and somewhere over 100,000 physicians...it offers some of the finest care in the world. It offers a range of services that Medicare can only dream of, and it does so at, it is believed, lower costs than private coverage or even Medicare. Plus, it also was an innovator in electronic health records and is today in telehealth. What's not to like?
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Is it Finally Time to Reinvent the Wheel?
When people talk about "reinventing the wheel, " it is often meant to discourage, even disparage. As in, "why reinvent the wheel?" It usually refers to a technology or a process that works well enough and is widely enough distributed that trying to replace it would be a fool's errand. Fortunately, the folks at DARPA aren't afraid of fool's errands -- and they are literally reinventing the wheel. Healthcare could use some fool's errands of its own. We all know what a wheel is. We know a wheel when we see one, we know what one does, we know how they do it. We've all traveled on wheels -- skates, bikes, cars, buses, whatever. It's hard to imagine a world before the wheel, before that beautiful circular shape, and it's hard to imagine improving on it.
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Joint Study between VA and UL shows UL Cybersecurity Standard provides robust risk management for connected medical devices
The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and UL, a global safety science organization, today announced the completion of a two-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) Program for medical device cybersecurity. As medical devices are susceptible to cybersecurity attacks, creating both patient safety risks and disclosure risks for protected health information, the VA and UL sought to address an existing gap in the marketplace for cybersecurity standards and practical certification approaches for connected medical devices. With the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) revolutionizing patient care, increasing efficiency and improving healthcare quality, the VA aimed to find solutions for securing large-scale IoMT device deployments supporting mission-critical care delivery for roughly nine million patients under its care. Read More »
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Kenya Rolls Out Open-Source e-Health System
An open source software e-health system being used in Kenya’s public hospitals since February has drastically cut costs and should pave the way for the model to be replicated in other East African countries. Read More »
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Let's Do Public Health Better
Eric Reinhart, who describes himself as “a political anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and physician,” has had a busy month. He started with an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about “reconstructive justice,” then an op-ed in The New York Times on how our health care system is demoralizing the physicians who work in it, and then the two that caught my attention: companion pieces in The Nation and Stat News about reforming our public health “system” from a physician-driven one to a true community health one. He's preaching to my choir. I wrote almost five years ago: “We need to stop viewing public health as a boring, not glamorous, small part of our healthcare system, but, rather, as the bedrock of it, and of our health.” Dr. Reinhart pulls no punches about our public health system(s), or the people who lead them...
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Let's Place Some Big Bets - Reinventing Medical Care
When we think about market research and Big Data, think about Henry Ford's (possibly apocryphal) quote: Most of our healthcare innovations and reforms take the existing healthcare system as a given and try to build upon it in some way. They add more on-ramps to the healthcare superhighway, widen its lanes, try to smooth the pavements, maybe even automate our driving on it. But sometimes we need to tear the highway down. Here, in brief, are some big bets I'd like to see someone take on...
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Lost in the Signal...Is Most Healthcare Spending Being Wasted?
I finally got around to reading Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. In it, Dr. Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University and self-avowed libertarian, argues that, aside from basic literacy and numeracy, our educational system serves less to educate and more as a way to signal to employers who might make good employees. Oh, boy did this book make me think about our healthcare system.Dr. Caplan's views on economic signaling are by no means out of the mainstream, although his application of it to education may be. Think of it this way:
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Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients
Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care? Read More »
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Medicare is Part of Us
July 1, the birthdate of our great nation, is also the birthdate of Canada’s emblematic health-care system...Now often referred to as unsustainable, this milestone provides an opportunity to reflect on the hardfought accomplishments of the past, to re-evaluate today’s system and to consider the growing debate about its future. Read More »
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New Open-Source Software Could Improve Breast Cancer Management
A new software suite is being developed in the Canadian Atlantic provinces that could make patient management and imaging resource use more efficient, not only in that region but in the rest of the world. Information on the system was presented this week at the 2012 World Cancer Congress. Read More »
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On The Positive Effect of Collaboration and Information Sharing Among Physicians
For better and for worse, our healthcare system is built around physicians. For the most part, they’re the ones we rely on for diagnoses, for prescribing medications, and for delivering care. And, often, simply for being a comfort. Unfortunately, in 2023, they’re still “only” human, and they’re not perfect. Despite best intentions, they sometimes miss things, make mistakes, or order ineffective or outdated care. The order of magnitude for these mistakes is not clear; one recent study estimated 800,000 Americans suffering permanent disability or death annually. Whatever the real number, we’d all agree it is too high. Many, myself included, have high hopes that appropriate use of artificial intelligence (AI) might be able to help with this problem. Two new studies offer some considerations for what it might take.
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Open-Source Software Suite Aims To Improve Breast Health Management
An open-source software suite to be rolled out across Nova Scotia early next year could improve breast health management worldwide, its creators say in a UICC research summary.
The Breast Imaging Electronic Medical Record (BIEMR) comes from 20 years of work to fill voids in proprietary software offerings, according to Mohamed Abdolell, an associate professor in the radiology department at Dalhousie University. Read More »
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