By NEEL SHAH, MD and DAN MICHELSON

It all started a few years ago with an out-of-the-blue e-mail:

“Neel – I saw the work you are doing via the article in the journal ‘Leadership’.  Congratulations as this is a great area of focus to pursue – the need to take down the complexity as it relates to cost/charge/reimbursement is a tough and an important issue.  There may be some interesting ways we can collaborate.  Best, Dan”

That e-mail would lead to a major initiative, a National Story Contest called The Best Care, The Lowest Cost: One Idea at a Time that we are launching this week.  More on that below, but first a little more background. 

At the time, Neel was finishing his clinical training as a physician and about to join the faculty at Harvard Medical School. Despite all that training, there was something that no one taught him: how his decisions were impacting what patients had to pay. Dan, who was leading Strata which is a company that helps hundreds of healthcare delivery systems with financial analytics, realized that most of these organizations didn’t have any access to cost data – they were flying blind.

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By MATTHEW HOLT

I’m steadily getting all those interviews I did 3+ months ago at HIMSS up onto THCB. (For those of you not paying attention we had a bunch of tech issues at THCB needing a big change and had to forswear videos for a while. But we’re baaack…)

Intersystems has grown dramatically in recent years as its Cache database tends to get sold in conjunction with Epic’s EMR. But Intersytems not only has its own EMR (sold outside of the US) but is a big player in the HIE business. At HIMSS 2015 they unveiled a new solution called the “Healthshare Personal Community” which allows providers and others to build patient accessible records on top of their HIE solution Healthshare. I interviewed Paul Grabscheid, VP of Strategic Planning about the company, the technology and what he’s seeing. (Ignore the last question as I ran out of disk space before he could answer!)

By AL LEWIS and VIK KHANNA

Hopefully at least a few of you have lamented –we’ll settle for “noticed” — our absence from The Health Care Blog for the last six months.   There are two reasons for that.  First, in the immortal words of the great philosopher Gerald Ford, “When a man is asked to make a speech, the first thing he has to do is decide what to say.”   Likewise, we need something compelling to say, and at this point yet-another-vendor-making-up-outcomes is old news, and in any event there is now an entire website devoted to exposing lies in wellness.  We, uh, take appellations and kick posteriors.

Also, our exposés were backfiring, having exactly the opposite of the intended effect.  For example, our THCB essay pointed out that Health Fitness Corporation’s Nebraska program should have its C. Everett Koop Award revoked because HFC admitted lying about saving the lives of Nebraskan cancer victims  who it turns out never had cancer in the first place.  Instead of revoking the award, the chair of the awards committee, Ron Goetzel, has subsequently twice called the Nebraska program a “best practice.”Continue reading…

By Gordon Andrew

After nearly a century of fighting for the legitimacy of her “love child” daughter, the long-time mistress of President Warren G. Harding, was recently vindicated by new DNA testing.

The tenacity of Nan Britton and her family helped to prove that America’s 29th president fathered more than the Teapot Dome corruption scandal. Harding never met his out-of-wedlock daughter, Elizabeth Ann, but demonstrated presidential timber by providing financial support for her until he died in office at the age of 57.

For Chief Marketing Officers, the outcome of this juicy scandal might provide some hope that hard work and determination can help them to legitimize the often maligned marketing function, and perhaps increase their stature and length of tenure at the senior management table.

Unfortunately, there are no DNA tests to validate marketing as a legitimate member of the CXO family of business functions. But there are some unscientific ways to accomplish that goal within your company:

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By THCBist

Henry writes:

“What if someone approaching age 65 who lives in New Hampshire does not want to enroll in Medicare—what kind of health insurance alternatives might be available?”