By MICHAEL MILLENSON

Congress is infected with the budget-cutting bug, and building an effective immune system requires political savvy. Sometimes, it’s simple (“We bomb terrorists” or “We process Social Security checks”), but sometimes an agency struggles. Case in point: AHRQ.

A House subcommittee recently voted to eliminate the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) as of Oct. 1, 2015, the start of fiscal 2016. If you hadn’t heard the news or aren’t sure why you should care, that’s exactly the point.

The GOP-led House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions (HELP) first voted to ax AHRQ back in 2012, along with other big government cuts; the agency escaped thanks to political gridlock that led to continuing budget resolutions instead of individual appropriations bills. Now, with the GOP in control of both houses of Congress, AHRQ has again been “terminated,” to quote the legislative language. But before railing against the Republicans, look at it from their viewpoint.

What HELP did was take about a half-billion dollars from Obamacare bureaucrats and use it as part of the budget boost given to scientists seeking to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and similar ills at the National Institutes of Health, and to those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working to protect Americans from dangerous epidemics such as Ebola.

You got a problem with that?

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By CANCER GEEK

Last night my friend and mentor Marie Ennis-O’Connor (@JBBC) highlighted her recent post on Medium entitled: “Patients As A Prop.”

Marie’s post pointed me to an opinion piece written by Niam Yaraghi  (@niamyaraghi) for US News and World Report. (Niam is a fellow at Brookings Institute’s Center for Technology Innovation with a special focus on healthcare economics and health information) Niam’s post titled, “Don’t Yelp Your Doctor” discusses whether or not patients are capable or qualified to evaluate their physicians.

Niam writes:

“Patients are neither qualified nor capable of evaluating the quality of the medical services that they receive.”

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By PATRICIA SALBER, MD                     SPONSORED CONTENT

Prior to attending medical school, Parth Desai took a gap year to help his mom manage his dad’s small internal medicine practice.  She was worried about how she was going to handle the looming transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10.  Parth said he would help her out.

He looked at different consultants and programs, but they were all too complicated, too expensive, or both.  He also looked at a number of different ICD-10 training programs, but didn’t really find anything that he thought was that good.  He wanted help with code conversions, but everything he saw was slow, or required additional personnel, or was too costly.

So, he did what lots of entrepreneurs do, he decided to build what he needed himself.  He enlisted his former college roommate, Will Pattiz, a “tech whiz, outdoor enthusiast, and filmmaker” to help him and together they developed software that automates the conversion of ICD-9 to ICD-10 codes. 

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San Francisco, CA – Health 2.0, the largest global conference and innovation community in digital health announces the agenda for The 9th Annual Fall Conference. The event will host over 3000 attendees and more than 150 LIVE demos in over 35 sessions across 4 days. This year’s exciting line-up features main stage panels on:

• New technologies for outcomes based care

• Consumer tools for tracking, rapid diagnostics, and digital therapeutics

• Big data tools and analytics for smarter health care

• Data and technology advancing healthy communities

• The frontier of Health 2.0: robotics, 3-D printing, virtual reality, space medicine and more!

Special Sessions:

• New technologies for care delivery organizations

• Launch!  The top 10 brand new companies in health tech

• Traction — The leading startup business competition in health tech

• Investment trends and a look inside the biggest deals in digital health

Featured Speakers:

• Chelsea Clinton, Vice Chair, The Clinton Foundation. Chelsea will speak to women’s health and the work of The Clinton Foundation to strengthen health systems in developing countries, increase opportunities for women and girls around the world, and to help Americans live healthier lives.
• Dr. Bob Wachter, Professor and Associate Chair of the Dept. of Medicine, University of California San Francisco. Bob will share insights from his latest book “The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Digital Age” which examines the promises, controversies and obstacles in the new digital age of healthcare.

With Other Speakers:

• Dr. James Madara, President, American Medical Association
• Robin Thurston, Chief Digital Officer, Under Armour
• Gregory Orr, Director of Consumer Digital Health, Walgreens

Many more speaker, panel, and session announcements coming soon on the agenda here. Start-up & academic rates are available online on the registration website. Full-time clinicians can apply for free registration.

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By SAURABH JHA, MD

I recall a talk on imaging biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). “Take this with a pinch of salt. I have a financial conflict of interest (COI) in the success of these markers,” the speaker warned. I glanced at the audience – MDs and PhDs with a cumulative IQ higher than the French intake of wine. I looked for pinches. I searched for salt. I found neither.

I wondered what a speaker’s disclosure is supposed to trigger. Should we say “Stop, don’t advance your power point, until we regroup?” Demand that the statistics be re-run in front of us. Challenge, “You say p is 0.04. No, you lying Gordon Gekko, it’s actually 0.06.” Or ask “did you submit ANOVA to Tukey?” If we must ask these questions, must we not ask routinely? Skepticism is a habit, not an episodic righteous angst.

No really, I’m not being facetious, what should transparency make us do differently? His disclosure, paradoxically, made him a saint for his honesty, and gave the audience an excuse to switch off their skeptical neurons, which I suspect had been switched off all along.

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By JEROME CARTER, MD

Increasingly, research is becoming available that reveals the weaknesses and strengths of health information technologies.   Everything from infusion pumps to EHR systems have been subjected to analysis.  The new flow of information is wonderful to behold because it wasn’t too long ago that little in the way of actionable HIT research was available.

Research on usability, interoperability, and patient safety can lead to better clinical care software. From these studies, we are learning important information about workflow disruptions, clinician information needs, user interface issues, errors, etc. Now that we have more research, how do we use it to produce better products, to address the needs of HIT users?

Who actually builds HIT products?  Software engineers. They turn feature requests and requirements lists into working software making software engineers a rate-limiting component of any process leading to new products. Therefore, at some point, research must make it into the hands of software engineers who then covert it into objects, methods, APIs, and data store specifications. Continue reading…