Category: Uncategorized

Amazon.com as a Delivery Model for Population Health

Feb 27, 2014• 7

By NICK DAWSON

There’s that line about art, “good artists copy, great artists steal.” There’s some debate about if Picasso said it first, but most of us geeks know it from Steve Jobs.

Often, I see things from companies and industries outside of healthcare —processes, products, best practices —which inspire me. I like these little inspirations because they often aren’t rocket science, but nonetheless fuel some creative thoughts about their applicability in healthcare.

The other night, around 9:00 PM on a holiday Monday, I ordered some obscure aviation stuff from Amazon. I needed a new headset, a leg-mounted chart holder, a paper calculating tool called an E6B computer and a portable canister of oxygen.

I have Amazon Prime, their subscription service which provides expedited 2 day shipping, so I expected to see my stuff on Wednesday afternoon. I was blown away when there was an Amazon box outside my door by 9:00 AM the next morning, Tuesday.

A box showed up early, big deal, right?

Here’s what I think happened and why I’m so impressed. I had been browsing for some aviation stuff for a few days. Amazon clearly knows and tracks my window shopping. It’s how they suggest items when you come back to the site.

I believe they preemptively moved some of those obscure aviation items to the closest distribution center in anticipation of my purchase. In fact, Amazon was awarded a patent for exactly that process last week.

By predicting my purchasing behavior, Amazon was able to beat my expectations for delivery – a known threat to their model is the instant gratification of local retail – and get my package to me in 12 hours.

We’ve got a lot of data in healthcare. That’s to the lagging but persistent implementation of electronic medical records, doctors and health systems are beginning to apply some big data science to their patient populations. For instance, any credible EMR can tell a physician how many of her patients have asthma.

More advanced systems, including bolt on solutions can look at disease panels and cross sample against last visit date. Mr. Smith, we see it’s been a year since your last visit, how’s your arthritis? Can we schedule you and appointment with Dr. Jones?

How Mayo Clinic Is Using iPads to Empower Patients

Feb 26, 2014• 8

By Cook, Thompson, Dearani & Prinsen

Throughout the world, companies are embracing mobile devices to set customer expectations, enlist them in satisfying their own needs, and get workers to adhere to best practices. An effort under way at the Mayo Clinic shows how such technology can be used to improve outcomes and lower costs in health care.

Defining the care a patient can expect to receive and what the road to recovery will look like is crucial. When care expectations are not well defined or communicated, the process of care may drift, leading to unwarranted variation, reduced predictability, longer hospital stays, higher costs, poorer outcomes, and patient and provider dissatisfaction.

With all this in mind, a group at the Mayo Clinic led by the four of us developed and implemented a standardized practice model over a three-year period (2010-2012) that significantly reduced variation and improved predictability of care in adult cardiac surgery.

One of the developments that germinated in that effort was the interactive Mayo myCare program, which uses an iPad to provide patients with detailed descriptions of their treatment plans and clinical milestones, educational materials, and a daily “To Do” list, and to report their progress and identify problems to their providers.

Reflecting on Health Reform–Narrow Networks: Boon or Bane?

Feb 25, 2014• 40

By David Blumenthal, MD

Some health plans sold through the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance marketplaces use “narrow networks” of providers: that is, they limit the doctors and hospitals their customers can use.

Go to Doctor A or Hospital A and the plan will pay all or most of the bill. Go to Doctor B or Hospital B, and you may have to pay all or most of the bill yourself.

The narrow network strategy emerged long before the ACA, during the managed care era in the 1990s, and insurance companies and large, self-insured employers have used narrow networks ever since to control health care costs.

In fact, for the first time, the ACA creates new consumer protections requiring that insurers provide a minimum level of access to local providers. A number of states have exceeded these federal standards using their discretion under the new law.

Nevertheless, some consumer advocates and ACA critics still find narrow networks objectionable. Narrow networks mean that some newly insured people are no longer covered for visits to previous providers, or, if they didn’t have a doctor before, are limited in their new choices. Not infrequently, narrow networks exclude the most expensive doctors and hospitals in a community, including some specialists and academic health centers.

More expensive doctors and hospitals are not necessarily better, but for patients with a rare or complex health problem, such restrictions can be problematic.

Welcome to the world of competition in health care, because that is what narrow networks are about. Narrow networks are used by competing plans to control health care costs, and perhaps improve quality as well. In fact, if you don’t like narrow networks, you’re saying, in effect, that you don’t like competitive solutions—as least under current market conditions—to our health system’s problems.

That Vitamin There Could Kill You

Feb 25, 2014• 20

By James Salwitz, MD

Once-upon-a-time, when a patient said they were taking a vitamin, most doctors would simply shrug their shoulders and say, “well, I guess its OK, it couldn’t hurt.” There was little research to judge the affect of vitamin supplements, so there was no reason to take a stand. That is no longer true.

Now we have published data on many vitamins and we can say that for most people they do not work. More importantly, there is increasing research that says manufactured, chemically synthesized nutriment compounds in a pill, can be deadly.

For this reason, I am likely to ask my patients if they are taking a vitamin and, if so, which fabricated additive and how much. Therefore, I asked Bill, while he was in the office receiving chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease, what alternative therapies he was using.

When he informed me that he swallowed a multivitamin (MVI), large doses of Vitamins C and E, as well as a B complex preparation, I advised him to stop.

To my astonishment he responded, “Well, you only want me to do that because you make a lot of money on chemotherapy, and vitamins might put you out of business.”

Bill’s response, he lack of trust in my advice, disturbs me at several levels. He fails to understand and does not wish to learn the present state of science regarding nutrition. In addition, there is a major problem regarding his perception of my motivations and therefore the veracity of my guidance.

Let us be clear; in the absence of malnutrition, malabsorption and a few uncommon medical conditions, there is absolutely no reason to take a multivitamin. They do not prevent or fix anything. Originally developed for starving populations and hungry soldiers during the Second World War, they have no place in a society with access to a broad range of foods.

More importantly, there is increasing data that people taking a multivitamin may become less healthy.

HxRefactored: Win Complimentary Passes During HIMSS 2014!

Feb 24, 2014

In the spirit of HIMSS 2014 and improving the health experience, we want to give two attendees the chance to take what they have learned from HIMSS and take it to the next level. That’s why we are giving away TWO FREE passes to the HxRefactored conference!

All you have to do is:

Tune-in on Twitter during the following sessions:
- Session – Five Proven Methods for Multidisciplinary Teams to Create Clinical User Experiences , Tuesday, February 25th from 1:00 – 2:00PM. Presenter: Lorraine Chapman, Macadamian.
- Session – I nnovation in Healthcare – The future of Healthcare is Here Today, Wednesday, February 26th from 11:30AM – 12:30PM. Presenter: Timothy J Theriault, Walgreens.

Doctors Without State Borders: Practicing Across State Lines

Feb 24, 2014• 18

By Robert Kocher, MD

In the United States, a tangled web of federal and state regulations controls physician licensing. Although federal standards govern medical training and testing, each state has its own licensing board, and doctors must procure a license for every state in which they practice medicine (with some limited exceptions for physicians from bordering states, for consultations, and during emergencies).

This bifurcated system makes it difficult for physicians to care for patients in other states, and in particular impedes the practice of telemedicine. The status quo creates excessive administrative burdens and like contributes to worse health outcomes, higher costs, and reduced access to health care.

We believe that, short of the federal government implementing a single national licensing scheme, states should adopt mutual recognition agreements in which they honor each other’s physician licenses. To encourage states to adopt such a system, we suggest that the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) create an Innovation Model to pilot the use of telemedicine to provide access to underserved communities by offering funding to states that sign mutual recognition agreements.

The Current System And Its Drawbacks

State licensure of physicians has been widespread in the United States since the late nineteenth century. Licensure laws were ostensibly enacted to protect the public from medical incompetence and to control the unrestrained entry into the practice of medicine that existed during the Civil War. However, it no longer makes sense to require a separate medical license for each state.

Today, medical standards are evidence-based, and guidelines for medical training are set nationally through the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Graduate Medical Education standards, and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. All U.S. physicians must pass either the United States Medical Licensure Examinations or the Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination.

Although the basic standards for initial physician licensure are uniform across states, states impose a patchwork of requirements for acquiring and maintaining licenses. These requirements are varied and burdensome and deter doctors from obtaining the licenses required to practice across state lines.

What A Green Three Ring Binder Says About the State of Meaningful Use and Health Information Exchange

Feb 24, 2014• 5

By Rob Cronin

The photo says it all.

The green notebook and pen represent the latest and greatest health IT innovations used by the hospital nurse to record my wife’s health information in the hours before her surgery to re-attach a fully torn Achilles tendon.

(Apologies for the cheeky intro and to my wife and anyone else for any HIPAA violations I may have committed in the capturing of this image).

It’s not that the hospital does not have an electronic health record.

They do – from a vendor widely considered a leader in the industry: Meditech. Same goes with the physician practice where she receives all her care and where her surgeon and primary care doctor are based.

They too have an EHR from another leading vendor: NextGen.

The problem? These systems are not connected. Thus, confirming the not so surprising news that health data interoperability has yet to make its debut in our corner of the NYC burbs.

Fortunately for my wife, she is well on her way to recovery (a bit more reluctant to juggle a soccer ball with her son in airport passenger lounges, but nevertheless feeling much better…and mobile). By everyone’s estimation – hers, mine, friends who suffered the same injury and friends who happen to be doctors – she received high quality care.

What’s more, we feel the overall patient experience at our physician practice and the hospital was quite good. That said, I cannot help but ask myself a series of ‘what ifs?’

What if…we forgot to mention a medication she was taking and there was a bad reaction with medication they administered as part of the surgery or afterwards?

What if… the anesthesiologist or surgeon couldn’t read the nurse’s handwriting?

What if the next time we go to the hospital, it is a visit to the emergency room and the attending clinicians have no ability to pull any of my family’s health records and we are not exactly thinking clearly enough to recall details related to medical history?

Seven Reasons Why Your Doctor Is Still Using Technology That Sucks

Feb 24, 2014• 8

By Charlene Ngamwajasat

Did you ever walk into a doctor’s office and then have to fill out a long paper intake form with the same information you’ve filled out multiple times before (name, date of birth, insurance etc)? Or notice that your doctor is writing notes on pieces of paper that remind you of your days in school? Did you ever see someone carry a pager around? Was that person wearing a white coat?

You can bank and pay for your Etsy/Amazon/Target/Apple “gotta have that now” stuff online. You can Skype with your family who lives thousands of miles away. You can order a pizza & know the exact moment it comes out of the oven. You can interact with @Oreo, @TacoBell @Grumpycat online.

So why can’t you easily see your health charges online? Why can’t you get a quick text or email that you’ll be seen by your doctor in 10 minutes? Why can’t you Skype with your doctor?

1. Until recently, your doctor has probably had little to no training or exposure to the world of digital health.

If you do a quick and dirty poll and ask the MD’s in your life what it is, you’ll likely get a ?-mark look or an answer related to apps, electronic medical records, or meaningful use. How can that be? Don’t most doctors have smartphones & tablets? Yes, a lot do but their use in a professional capacity isn’t 100% yet.

Until recently, there were no courses in med school or noon lectures in residency related to health information technology, wearables, personalized medicine, medical apps etc

It’s hard to use something or integrate it into your daily life if you’ve never heard of or really used it before.Continue reading…

CVS Caremark Enters CommonWell

Feb 24, 2014• 4

By John H. Hammergren

One of the most critical issues facing our healthcare system is the fact that the IT systems we’ve put in place have not yet led to a more connected, intelligent approach to patient care.

While we have made notable headway toward interoperability through health information exchange solutions, we must dramatically accelerate our progress to support the transition to value-based care and realize our full potential as an industry.

With this vision in mind, McKesson, Cerner and other leading healthcare IT companies announced the CommonWell Health Alliance last year at HIMSS13. Members of the Alliance are united by a shared commitment to develop a core set of interoperability services and standards that will enable patient data to be shared securely across care settings and electronic health record (EHR) platforms.

In the twelve months since, tremendous progress has been made in making this aspiration a reality. CommonWell is running robust initial projects and collaborating with a myriad of practices. We’re also continuing to expand with new members who share our ideal of the trusted exchange of patient data, regardless of vendor, system, or setting.

Now, the Alliance is welcoming its first pharmacy member in CVS Caremark. This is a watershed event for several reasons.

CVS Caremark is one of the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains and pharmacy benefit management companies. Few organizations in any segment of healthcare have more access to patient data and more trusted influence.

But CVS Caremark’s role in driving innovation in our healthcare system, and its importance to the goal of interoperability, is vital for other reasons.

Are Payors Changing What They Pay For Medical Billing Codes To Adjust For Supply and Demand?

Feb 24, 2014• 8

By THCBist

Startup Mojo from Rhode Island writes:

Hey there, maybe THCB readers can weigh in on this one. I work at a healthcare startup. Somebody I know who works in medical billing told me that several big name insurers they know of are using analytics to adjust reimbursement rates for medical billing codes on an almost daily and even hourly basis (a bit like the travel sites and airlines do to adjust for supply and demand) and encourage/discourage certain codes. If that’s true, its certainly fascinating and pretty predictable, I guess.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. It sounds draconian. On the other hand, it also sounds cool. Everybody else is doing the same sort of stuff with analytics: why not insurers? Information on this practice would obviously be useful for providers submitting claims, who might theoretically be able to game the system by timing when and how they submit. Is there any data out there on this?

Is this b.s. or not?

Lost in the health care maze? Having trouble with your health Insurance? Confused about your treatment options? Email your questions to THCB’s editors. We’ll run the good ones as posts.