Julie Creswell
See the following -
Doctors Find Barriers to Sharing Digital Medical Records
...While most providers have installed some kind of electronic record system, two recent studies have found that fewer than half of the nation’s hospitals can transmit a patient care document, while only 14 percent of physicians can exchange patient data with outside hospitals or other providers...
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Health Care Systems Should Not Be Run For Profit, But Rather For People's Health
I wrote in a recent blog [...] that our health care system ”…is a parallel to our financial services industry: private enterprise is given a license to make money from everyone, and the government finances it. The only difference is that for financial services, the government steps in to bail them out only after they have already stolen all our money, while in health services the profit margin is built in from the start.” [...] Read More »
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Let's do the numbers
Julie Creswell and Reed Abelson offer a story in the New York Times about the HCA for-profit hospital system, noting "A giant hospital chain is blazing a profit trail." The HCA story and similar ones about other hospital chains financed by private equity force us to consider how a such firms can achieve a return on equity that satisfies investors. Read More »
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The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills
Early last year, executives at a small hospital an hour north of Spokane, Wash., started using a company called EmCare to staff and run their emergency room. The hospital had been struggling to find doctors to work in its E.R., and turning to EmCare was something hundreds of other hospitals across the country had done. That's when the trouble began. Before EmCare, about 6 percent of patient visits in the hospital's emergency room were billed for the most complex, expensive level of care. After EmCare arrived, nearly 28 percent for the highest-level billing code...
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