versus other approaches to universal care is getting a run out. At TPMcafe, Leif Wellington Haase wonders about
"Universal Health Care: Many Roads to Rome?" The piece argues that the
goal of universal coverage can be pursued through many means, not only through
insisting on a "single-payer only" strategy. On the same theme at SignalHealth John Rodat’s Politics After Single Payer, is a piece about single-payer proponents struggling to reconcile their shared disdain for President Bush and Republican Congressional leadership with their confidence in complete Federal control of healthcare financing in the US. John also wrote, "A Tiny Technical Issue of Constitutional Significance" about the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The Act had many provisions related to health care, especially Medicare and Medicaid, but John argues that the most important issue is one of legislative procedure, an inconsistency between the House and Senate passed versions of and the cavalier manner in which the political leadership ignored a fundamental rule of lawmaking in the US.
At Point of Law, insurance specialist Martin Grace of Georgia State looks at some current controversies over medical malpractice and concludes that the recent crisis is not just an artifact of the "insurance cycle", as some have contended; and that the leveling off of premiums in the past year should not be taken as a sign that our medical liability system has somehow reverted to health.
Dmitriy, the Publisher of The Medical Blog Network has looked into the firestorm caused by New York Times article "Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong", noting that P4P is here to stay and now even AMA is getting with the program.
Shahid Shah, The Healthcare IT Guy, blogs about how we should all start using RSS for health/medical alerts and data sharing. In the posting he reminded us that today’s medical devices send out alerts using push-based approaches which are usually proprietary. He encourages software vendors to start providing RSS/ATOM feeds from their applications to help get non-safety-critical data out of their health IT systems because it’s easier to use, interoperable, and a cinch to deploy.
Tim Gee at Medical Connectivity reports on the creation of a health care advisory board for portable computing device vendor OQO. The OQO “pocketable” Windows computer could be the device that overcomes limitations that have held back the adoption of other devices like PDAs and Tablet computers.
MrHISTalk features an excellent article from Nurse Janus about the hellish life of a clinician going through a major install, and subsequent un-install. And of course most of the best gossip in the hospital IT world lives at that site.
Turning his hand to tech, Dmitriy of The Medical Blog Network reports from the CalRHIO Summit III, making sense of how capable are RHIOs of truly serving the interests of consumers. What is rhetoric and what is reality? He also writes about the tough talk dished out by Craig Barrett towards the healthcare industry and why this is the leading indicator of general public’s attitude towards the industry.
Guesting on THCB, hospital IT director Roy Johnson is not exactly impressed by the “highness” of the tech in health care IT.
Rod, on the Informaticopia Blog examines the implications of an announcement by UK universities that they will be changing their user authentication system from Athens to Shibboleth over the next few years. As the UK’s National Health Service currently uses the Athens system for its 1 million + staff it is likely that they will need to go the same way.
Rod would also like to give everyone a “heads up” about the HC2006 Blog from Europe’s Healthcare Computing Conference and Exhibition (which is sort of equivalent to HIMSS) on 20-22nd March. The blog will be an eclectic collection of news and views – as near to real time as we can get it – and offer the opportunity for those unable to attend to comment on the issues.
Meanwhile, if you are thinking of haranguing a journalist or a blogger about your company’s incredible new software product, Neil Versel’s Healthcare IT Blog tells you what not to do
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Thanks to all those who contributed, especially as I had them do it in a very vicious stringent format which almost everyone kept to. It really cuts down on the hosts work, so I recommend it to future hosts. You can see what I suggested for contributors here.
In two weeks Kate Steadman will host HRW over at Healthy Policy.
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