The Pew Trusts’s e-patients blog (the one in honor of Tom Ferguson) has linked over to some very cool introductory videos to socal netowrking, blogs, wikis, & social bookmarking. About a minute each and great to explain these things to your grandma or CEO.
Here’s the post
David Williams of the Health Business Blog fame has shaved his beard off. I had one of those terrible moments when I saw him a couple of weeks back of knowing I knew him but not being able to place the face–then I realized that was because he’s changed it! (He used to have much more hair on the bottom of his face than on the top!)
That’s all irrelevant. What’s not irrelevant is that today he’s hosting Health Wonk Review over at Health Business Blog.
Paul Levy is the President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical
Center in Boston. Paul recently became the focus of much media
attention when he decided to publish infection rates at his hospital,
despite the fact that under Massachusetts law he is not yet required to
do so. For the past year and a half he has blogged about his
experiences in an online journal, Running a Hospital, one of the few blogs we know of maintained by a senior hospital executive.
Last week, the Harvard Medical School Division of Medical Ethics
held a session on the ethical issues surrounding blogging by a CEO,
particularly the CEO of a health care institution. Local examples were
this blog and the one published by Charlie Baker,
CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. Unfortunately, I could not attend,
but I received a note from one of the attendees who told me about some
issues that had been raised. I’ll report on that and add the comments I
would likely have made if I had been present.One of the
discussants identified four domains that he thought of as important in
thinking about the ethics of a CEO blog, and about which he posed some
questions: 1. Voice: Is the CEO blogger blogging as an
individual or as the voice of the organization? Charlie’s blog is
hosted in the HPHC website and linked to HPHC marketing materials.
Yours is on Blogger and not linked to the BIDMC site. But when the CEO
speaks, what he or she says can’t be separated from the organization.
It’s official! Health 2.0 Connecting Consumers and Providers has sold out — exactly one month to the day before the conference. (March 3rd-4th/Westin San Diego.) If you absolutely, positively have to be there, we have opened a waiting list. A limited number of people may be offered passes in the event of cancellations or a change in availability. If your company wants a presence in the hall, a limited numbers of passes are still available for exhibitors and sponsors email in**@********on.com for details. What’s all the fuss about? Go take a look at the agenda. Stay tuned for updates. (TIP: If you’d like to receive notification of agenda changes, updates and other conference news sign up for our newsletter.)
I don’t know how many of you linked over to Lawrence Brown’s perspective piece “The Amazing,
Non-Collapsing US Health Care System” in the January 24th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine
(buried in Mathew’s “Whisper it quietly. . .” post), but it’s the most useful piece of political analysis of the health reform conundrum I’ve seen in a long time.
What Brown argues, convincingly, is that we really have three healthcare systems: public and private health FINANCING systems (which operate in the lucrative fantasy land of “reimbursement”) and a public CARE system (the safety net urban hospitals, community health centers, public health clinics, the VA, etc.) that serve the rural and urban poor and uninsured.
Other than a few isolated outposts like Kaiser, the third health system that Brown discusses is the only place in the United States where population health is actually practiced. And, most important, it is also is the mysterious resource that prevents the 47 million uninsured, including a very large number of our 12 million undocumented people, from dying in our streets, and causing a huge political crisis. It is invisible to much of the voting public, but thank God we have a safety net healthcare system.
This latter system has been a political stepchild of state and federal governments, and lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis, living off the land. But it has successfully propped up the other two, and, I think, helped prevent a revolution. Precisely because it has succeeded in reaching its target populations and helping them, albeit “too late” in the disease process, it has drained both political urgency (and funding) from making the first two “reimbursement” systems universal.
I missed Friday’s debate but please can we all remember 3 things before we continue to get too excited about the Obama/Clinton faux dispute
a) Mandates alone don’t work to get to 100% coverage–every employer mandate has exemptions–every individual mandate needs exemptions or subsidies AND it needs a fundamental re-set on how ALL health insurers currently operateb) Most likely any mandate bill will get bargained down to less than it needs to be to workc) Unless the recession is really really bad and still that way in mid-2009, the current health insurance problem is not bad enough for there to be a groundswell of support for an actual meaningful bill to pass over the sure to be violent opposition of AHIP, PhRMA, AHA, AMA et al.
Which means we’ll either get nothing or some watered down version of what AHIP/AMA proposes.
Which means we’ll all be back in 2012 asking how to fix health care…
Eric writes:
It’s brief, but, being a Giants fan, there is little more to say…
Beware the Experts (reason #2,754)
Another reason why leaving control over our destiny- whether it be our leisure, work, or heath- completely in the hands of ‘experts’ should give us all pause… 9 out of 11 (89%) of Sports Illustrated Experts picked the New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XLII. They lost. (I will leave it to Matthew to make a comment about how the Super Bowl is not really a ‘football’ game.)
Robert Laszweski has been a fixture in Washington health policy circles for the better part of three decades. He currently serves as the president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates of Alexandria, Virginia. Before forming HPSA in 1992, Robert served as the COO, Group Markets, for the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. You can read more of his thoughtful analysis of healthcare industry trends at The Health Policy and Marketplace Blog.
John McCain’s campaign reinvigorated, I am reposting my earlier analysis of his health reform plan.
McCain very rightly points to health care costs as the biggest issue, "We are approaching a ‘perfect storm’ of problems that if not addressed by the next president will cause our health care system to implode."
Therefore, his focus is on the health care costs that make health insurance so expensive that individuals can’t afford it for themselves, employers can’t afford to provide it to their employees, and government can’t afford a wider safety net for the poor. He also reminds us that costs can’t be improved without dealing with quality in tandem. so expensive that many
Craig Stoltz is a web consultant working in the health 2.0 space. He has previously served as health editor for the Washington Post and editorial director of Revolution Health. He blogs at Web 2.0 … Oh really?
Whenever candidates drop out of a race, the first question is, Who’s going to get the stuff?
News reports said that both Clinton’s and Obama’s people immediately starting picking John Edwards’ pockets–for delegates, supporters, fundraisers, gold teeth, etc.–while the former candidate’s body was
still warm.
Rudy Giuliani gave it all to McCain immediately. But it’s hard to imagine that there hadn’t been
negotiations over the former mayor’s little stash of blood and treasure before the announcement was made.
But what I want to know is a bit more focused, if wonky: What happens to Edwards’ and Giuliani’s healthcare ideas now that they’re gone?
First, let’s see if they had any.
Wendy Everett is president of the New England Healthcare Institute. She thinks that the candidates for President from both parties agree on the important stuff for health care–dealing with chronic care prevention. I can’t say that I’m totally in agreement with her political analysis, but her ideas about chronic care and prevention for the basis of bipartisan action are interesting (and as Wendy used to be my boss at IFTF I thought that it would be polite of me to let her have shot on THCB!)
The presidential candidates are doing a disservice to the voters and to themselves when they emphasize their differences over how to fix the broken health care system. They can argue all they want about the likes of universal coverage, tax incentives and employer mandates, but that cacophony obscures the fact that the candidates, regardless off party, actually share a major position on health reform. Though little-noticed to date, there is a breakthrough bipartisan consensus that the key to health reform is to redirect the system to prevention and management of chronic illnesses.
This unanimity is huge. Chronic diseases – including conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hypertension – are a major threat to both our health and our economy. More than half of all Americans already suffer from one or more chronic ailments, and the rate is rising as the population ages.And the price tag is staggering. Some 80 percent of the more than $2 trillion in annual health expenditures already goes to taking care of patients with chronic diseases. A recent Milken Institute study found that in 2003, chronic care cost the country $277 billion for treatment and another $1 trillion in lost worker productivity. If nothing is done to halt the rise of chronic illness, the Milken Institute projects that treatment and lost economic output will rise to $4.2 trillion by 2023.
And yet much of this cost is completely avoidable.
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