THCB

Categories

Category: Uncategorized

The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge–It’s On!

• 3

By Indu Subaiya & Matthew Holt

Today is the formal kick-off of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge. The challenge was first announced by Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra on June 2 at the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) meeting, and it’s partly a continuation of the great work done within CHDI, and partly an expansion of the code-a-thon/developer camp effort to the whole Health 2.0 community. The challenge is supported by HHS. It’s being run by the Health 2.0 Conference, with partners O’Reilly, Internet2, Sunlight Labs, Healthtap & the Health 2.0 Accelerator.

Anyone can submit a challenge or join a team to solve a challenge. But the goal is to get the health care and developer communities working on building new innovative applications in rapid-fire time.

The Challenge has two parts: online and offline. The online challenge process officially begins today—there are four challenges up already and we have several others in the queue, but we’re looking for more!

  • Whyville challenges game developers to build tools for their arcade to help kids understand and apply health data. The kids will vote on the winner!
  • Move your apps; a challenge to develop an app for the Android platform that helps users burn calories, brought to you by Snaptic & Hopelab
  • Practice Fusion‘s Real Time Patient-Driven Data Challenge invites developers to build applications that connect to the Practice Fusion EMR platform.
  • The Szollosi Healthcare Innovation Program wants to see whether a lightweight EMR can be built with blog and wiki software.
  • And……Your challenge here!!

Here’s the link to the challenges page

Teams will be working on challenges over the course of the summer. Selected winners from the challenges will be showcased at the Fall Health 2.0 Conference, and we’ll be building an online community of challengers and teams in the coming weeks.

Continue reading…

Durenberger: Health Insurance Chickens Come Home to Roost

• 1

By DAVE DURENBERGER

Former Republican Senator Dave Durenberger was always the sensible Republican on health care. He now hangs out in a small institute called the National Institute of Health Policy at a small Minnesota college called the University of St. Thomas. Every so often he puts out great commentary emails. His most recent one contains a really a great description of what happened to health insurance in the late 1990s. You can sign up here. Well worth a read and I’ve reprinted the part about insurance below—Matthew Holt

I’ve watched the ups and downs of health insurance products and “markets” since involving myself as an employer in the 70s in a community-wide effort by large employers to provide employees with a choice of health insurance plans, including the nascent HMO. Our goal was reducing health care costs through informed employees and accountable health plans, creating, in effect, new forms of insurance and competitive markets for insurance and medical services at the community level by using available information and consumer choices to facilitate behavior change.

While experiments like this across the country have been tried with varying success, we are now on the verge of doing a “back to the future” adaptation of our lessons learned. The health reform law (ACA) provides for state-based health insurance regulation, health insurance exchanges and a new emphasis in assisting “smart buys” by employees. Recall what happened to the HMO: It became large national “managed care organizations” like UnitedHealth Care (UHC) who lost community support for their behavior change because savings never stayed with those who earned them.

Continue reading…

In a Surprise Move, Administration Appoints Berwick to Head CMS

• 43

By MAGGIE MAHAR

Tuesday night the White House Blog explained: “In April, President Obama nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to serve as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points.

“But with the agency facing new responsibilities to protect seniors’ care under the Affordable Care Act, there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing. That’s why tomorrow the President will use a recess appointment to put Dr. Berwick at the agency’s helm and provide strong leadership for the Medicare program without delay.”

A “recess appointment” means that the president is putting Berwick in place while Congress is on recess (i.e. is taking a vacation). As a result, Berwick won’t have to go through a Senate confirmation hearing. Senate conservatives had made it clear that they hoped to defer this hearing for as long as possible.

The White House Blog notes that “CMS has been without a permanent administrator since 2006, and even many Republicans have called on the Administration to move to quickly to name a permanent head.”

Continue reading…

Navigating Cancer

• 2

By Matthew Holt

Gena Cook is the CEO of Navigating Cancer, a new Health 2.0 company aiming at getting cancer patients online with their care providers. Gena tracked me down in a Starbucks in Seattle (oxymoron I know) when I was up there last week, and she told me about the new company. Here’s the (short) interview

Marooned in the Horse Latitudes

• 15

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

Horse Latitudes

More than a year after glimpsing “green shoots” of economic recovery, President Obama saw nothing but parched brown in June’s employment numbers. The continuing stream of bad economic news is a far greater threat to his Presidency than that sickening orange plume of oil furiously gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The 9.5% June unemployment rate is essentially the same as it was a long thirteen months ago.. And support in Congress for more pump priming is essentially at an end.  Despite a 59 vote Senate majority, an increasing number of Democrats as well as the Republicans appear unwilling further to increase the federal deficit, even to extend unemployment benefits.

In 2010 thusfar , the economy has replaced only 600 thousand of the 8 million jobs lost in the recession. Only a little more than 100 thousand new private sector jobs have been created in the past two months, while the labor force shrank by almost a million.  If you add discouraged workers and those working part time involuntarily to the people officially unemployed, there are almost 26 million people out of work. A lot of those young people who fought to make Barack Obama President will have spent at least half of his term living in their parents’ basements.

President Obama is trapped between his increasingly angry core Democratic constituents- public sector unions, minorities, young people- and their muse, former economist/now political polemicist Paul “Jeremiah” Krugman, who believes we’re in a depression and need to throw yet more borrowed money from helicopters, and the rest of the country that is trying mightily to pay down their debts and is profoundly uncomfortable mortgaging our future to the Chinese.  It’s not obvious that either formula for salvation- the traditional Democratic balm of more money for worthy causes or the traditional (pre-George Bush) Republican regime of austerity and balanced budgets- gets the economy out of the ditch. Captain Obama has not enough political support to pursue either course, so the Ship of State and his Presidency are becalmed, sails flapping, sweltering in the Horse Latitudes.

Continue reading…

HIT Trends Summary for June 2010

By MICHAEL LAKE

Picture 6This is a summary of the HIT Trends Report for June 2010. You can get the current issue here.


E-prescribing. Not much to report here other than some feedback to the DEA around its long-awaited proposed rule to allow e-prescribing of controlled substances. Other than the Surescripts rightful defense of its history as an industry certifier, these are largely requests for clarification and cautions from the  pharmacy industry that smaller pharmacies may have some difficulties.

EHR. The big news this month is the Allscripts and Eclipsys combination. An integrated hospital and physician practice product will be increasingly important as hospitals reach out to affiliated practices with EMR solutions and plans to build clinically-integrated accountable care organizations. Also of note was the announcement by Dell and Practice Fusion to package up its software-as-a-service (SaaS) EMR for smaller practices. EMR suppliers are firming up their supply chains to make purchases as simple as possible. Dell has similar relationships with other companies including eClinicalWorks, Allscripts and others.  

GE Healthcare also followed up on its recent acquisition of MedPlexus, a SaaS EMR, with the launch of its Centricity Advance product for smaller practices. According to Health Data Management it’s being priced at $4K-$9K start up and $300-$800 per month. The launch event included a demo by a solo doc using the software and commentary by Newt Gingrich, Peter Basch, MD and others.

HITECH. HITECH this month focused on safety-net providers with grants to boost IT use and funds to figure out how they participate in reimbursement incentives. One project is part of a $2B HRSA grant under ARRA to expand health services to low-income and uninsured. Each recipient was awarded between $500,000 and $3M for new and enhanced EHR implementations and other uses. The other is a small grant to encourage participation of safety net providers in government programs. It’s a reminder that health IT in poorer communities is particularly challenging. Also out this month is a comprehensive policy view of HITECH by Manatt from an impressive cross-section of industry leadership.  Study was supported by CHCF, Colorado Health Foundation and UHF.

Continue reading…

Healthcare.gov, and health care at OSCON

• 1

By Matthew Holt

I'm trying to get better about putting my KOMO radio spots up here, if only because trying to be coherent about a topic in a couple or 45 second soundbites is pretty hard and therefore good practice. Today I'm talking about the new website launched last week by HHS called Healthcare.gov

Here's my two minute explanation (aimed at a the typical AM radio listener in Seattle).

Matthew talks about Healthcare.gov

One of the best analysis I've seen about Healthcare.gov is over on the O'Reilly Radar written by Andy Oram. You should check it out directly.  Andy's coverage of healthcare.gov is part of a bigger interest in healthcare generally from the O'Reilly & Web 2.0 communities, which we of course welcome! (They are partners in the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge)

One place where there's room for lots more activity is in Open Source in health care. Andy has been working hard on getting healthcare into the upcoming OSCON Conference in Portland, OR July 19-23. Here's the Health Care OSCON track. And here's Andy's preview of what will be in the track.

Andy wrote to me with some additional information about the Birds of a Feather meetup:

I want to encourage any interested person nearly Portland, OR to come in for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions even if they can't afford to attend the conference. BOFs are officially for session attendees,but no one ever checks badges and I organized the BOFs in the hope of drawing in more local people: 

The BOF session on Healthcare is Thursday July 21 at 7pm

Finally, three podcast interviews with health care speakers who'll be at OSCON:

  • Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache web server project and the CollabNet cooperative software development company, now with HHS on the CONNECT software project
  • Arien Malec, coordinator of NHIN Direct at ONC (and former RelayHealth-er)
  • Fred Trotter, open source advocate in health care and organizer of the (separate) OSHealthcon summit.

So if you're interested in open source and health care, you should make your way to Portland for OSCON.

How Would Modern Medicine have Helped our Early Patriots?

• 12

By ED PULLEN, MD
Geo Washington

On Independence Day I thought it would be interesting to look at the causes of death of some of our famous Revolutionary era patriots. When I started researching this I anticipated early deaths from infections and untreatable chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension.  Interestingly many of the famous early Americans lived to a ripe old age, and died of causes that even today may well have been their demise.

George Washington: Washington is an exception to the comment above. Washington died at age 67, likely of a pharyngeal infection, possibly streptococcal disease.  Today he would likely have received antibiotic treatment and survived this illness.

Continue reading…

Do-It-Yourself Health Care

• 5

By PATRICIA SALBER

I was debating merits of DIY healthcare with my buddy, Brian Klepper, PhD -healthcare analyst and pundit extraordinaire – the other day. He is not a fan, preferring instead to have better, stronger, more informed, technologically enabled physicians working in accountable care organizations. I am also a big believer in ACOs, patient-centered medical homes, and informed physicians, and all that stuff, but I think increasingly health care consumers (aka patients) are going to want to control more of their healthcare than they are currently able to do today.

The internet has made medical information more accessible than ever before. People with serious illnesses and/or chronic diseases sometimes end up knowing more about their condition than their physicians. But reading and understanding a medical condition is only scratching the tip of the consumer empowerment iceberg. What I am really interested in exploring is how technology can be used to further drive a true “consumer-directed healthcare” revolution.

Now I want to make it clear I am not proposing that people do their own surgery (although some have done it). Nor am I proposing self-prescription of expensive and/or potentially toxic therapeutics. But I am talking about consumers being able to order their own lab tests without involving a physician…and self-prescription of certain categories of medications (e.g.,statins).

Continue reading…

A Permanent “Doc-Fix” Remains Elusive

• 7

By NAOMI FREUNDLICHNaomi Freundlich

For now, all those physicians who threatened to make a mass exodus from Medicare can take a breather. Last week, the House voted to once again delay the mandated 21% cut in physician fees by another six months; thereby ensuring that the fight over the sustainable growth rate (SGR) will be resurrected sometime around Thanksgiving.

So far, Congress has kicked the SGR can down the road 10 times since 2003—four times just this year alone. The targets have long been considered unobtainable and the mandated physician payment cuts are opposed in Congress by Democrats as well as Republicans and supported by nearly no one. The level of anxiety among doctors continues to escalate every time the issue is raised—even though the cuts have never gone into effect for more than a couple of weeks. Why not get rid of this devilishly frustrating formula once and for all?

The short answer is that getting rid of the SGR—even though it has never led to any savings in Medicare—is just too expensive on paper. The Congressional Budget Office establishes a “baseline” projection of future spending and revenue that takes into account that all current laws will be enforced. Legislation that eliminates the SGR targets would then be scored by the CBO as adding to the deficit—to the tune of $276 billion between 2011 and 2020 even if Medicare payment rates to doctors were frozen at 2009 levels. In the current economic climate, it will be very hard to get enough members of Congress to agree to a permanent “doc fix” that eliminates the SGR targets without also finding a way to pay for it.

Continue reading…

assetto corsa mods