December 2011 – Page 7 – The Health Care Blog

2011 EHR Adoption Rates

Dec 2, 2011• 19

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

On Wednesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the results of its yearly survey on Electronic Health Records (EHR) adoption for office-based physicians. No surprises. Generally speaking, the majority of physicians in ambulatory practice are now using an EHR, and over half of surveyed doctors say that they intend to seek Meaningful Use incentives. The report is also presenting results broken down by state, so you can learn what folks are doing in your immediate vicinity. The more instructive exercise is to compare last year’s survey results [Fig. 1] to this year’s estimated EHR adoption numbers [Fig. 2].

EMR’s hockey stick up!

Dec 1, 2011• 1

Every VC loves and hates the hockey stick–that growth curve that potters along and then suddenly shoots up. But if you check out the new numbers from CDC the use of a basic EMR is on that hockey stick curve. Adoption of a “basic system” has gone from under 17% in 2008 to 33% this year, with another 40% of doctors saying they’re going for the Meaningful Use gold–which means essentially a more than “basic” system. So maybe this is a hockey stick curve that we can all love. (Well all other than the curmudgeons over at Health Care Renewal!). On a somewhat related personal note, I too was awaiting the hockey stick of EMR adoption. I abandoned my attempt to catch the start of the hockey curve in 2000 when I quit my EMR survey job at Harris Interactive. All I had to do was hang on for another eight years and I’d have been proved right!

Do We Really Spend More and Get Less?

Dec 1, 2011• 106

By John Goodman

The conventional wisdom in health policy is that the United States spends far more than any other country and enjoys mediocre health outcomes. This judgment is repeated so often and so forcefully that you will almost never see it questioned. And yet it may not be true.

Indeed, the reverse may be true. We may be spending less and getting more.

The case for the critics was bolstered last week by a new OECD report that concluded:

The United States spends two-and-a-half times more than the OECD average health expenditure per person … It even spends twice as much as France, for example, a country which is generally accepted as having very good health services. At 17.4% of GDP in 2009, U.S. health spending is half as much again as any other country, and nearly twice the average.

Similar claims were made recently in The New York Times by former White House health advisor, Zeke Emanuel, who added that we are not getting better health care as a result. The same charge was aired at the Health Affairs blog the other day by Obama Social Security Advisory Board appointee Henry Aaron and health economist Paul Ginsburg. It is standard fare at Ezra Klein’s blog, at The Incidental Economist and at the Commonwealth Fund. It is also unquestioned dogma for New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman.

What are all these people missing? On the spending side, they are overlooking one of the most basic concepts in all of economics.

Will Health Insurance Reform Reach Those Who Really Need It?

Dec 1, 2011• 10

By Preeti Vissa

Issues that affect our lives don’t happen in a vacuum. Everything affects everything else, and there’s no area where that’s truer than health and access to care. So I’m going to take a slight detour from the financial and economic issues I write about most of the time to say a bit about the Affordable Care Act, which marks a historic expansion of access to health care.

Thanks to the law, an estimated 32 million previously uninsured Americans will be able to purchase health insurance in 2014. But right now there are real questions about whether this historic expansion of coverage will reach those Americans who need it most.

My colleagues on The Greenlining Institute‘s health team have been looking into this, and just published their findings in the form of a new report. They focused on the new Health Benefit Exchanges, which will allow consumers to compare the price, quality, and benefits of competing health insurance plans. Maybe most important, Americans will be able to purchase coverage through their state’s Exchange with federal subsidies that will help low and middle-income families cover the cost.

The bottom line is that getting the word out about these new options may be more complicated than it seems, and state Exchanges should get communities involved in the process sooner rather than later.

Current plans call for Web portals to serve as the main route through which consumers will access the Exchanges, but these websites won’t be able to do the job by themselves. States will need to pursue a variety of outreach and enrollment strategies, strategies that must be based on the populations they must reach.

Hey East Coast Entrepreneurs: We Fail Better.

Dec 1, 2011

By David Shaywitz

Apparently, the secret to Silicon Valley’s success isn’t just the good weather and smart people – turns out, the secret to our region’s entrepreneurial preeminence just may be the way we embrace failure.

According to KPCB life-science (devices) partner Dana Mead – who notes he hails from the northeast — there’s a world of difference between Palo Alto and Cambridge (MA).

In Cambridge, he contends in a recent (and, as always, informative) lecture/podcast at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, if you tell people your last three businesses failed, “they’ll look at you sideways” and shake their heads, presumably with a mixture of sadness and pity. In Palo Alto, by contrast, the reaction will be “that’s awesome! I’m sure your next company will be a world-beater.”