Go take a look: www.thehealthcareblog.com/marketplace
And in reply to the ABC Obamamercial…
Stephen Colbert’s Republican Health Care Infomercial. Quite wonderful. Can’t get it to embed but here’s the link
The EHR TimeBar: A New Visual Interface Design
The EHR TimeBar functions as a high-level overview of the patient record, as a query device, and as an intuitive navigation tool. Each EHR file (event) for the patient is represented by an icon. The set of icons and their labels are displayed in column format on the right side of the screen.
The icons are connected to the TimeBar by vertical lines. Because the vertical lines accurately position each event on the TimeBar, the date of each event is usually omitted in order to reduce clutter.Continue reading…
Data to the People
I have been a strong proponent of the creation of a National Health Record (NHR), but will it increase the quality of care for each citizen? Without 100 percent compliance by all healthcare providers the establishment of the NHR will bear little fruit for its expense. Proponents of a NHR site the achievements of the VHA. VHA patients include highly mobile active and inactive soldiers. Ubiquitous methods for viewing clinical data are critical, however Joe Outpatient doesn’t move around in this manner nor does he stray far from the facilities where he receives care.
Commentology: National Health Information Networks; What is the Benefit?
Gregory Park from DB Technology, wrote in to say this about National Health Information Networks:
"I was wondering where is the debate on the real benefits in NHINs.
What is the benefit exactly? The way that I see it, most of the
benefits could be achieved by lower tech efforts such as disease
hotlines which exist today.
Health Wonk Review: Confederations Cup Edition
Up at the Healthcare Economist. Daniel Gilden's piece over here leads off, as it should!
It’s Not Just Doctors in Short Supply
Policy-makers involved in healthcare reform are making a mistake in disproportionately emphasizing our current doctor shortage while neglecting serious shortages of care providers in other fields of health. Rather than continuing a failed, piecemeal approach, the nation needs to establish a multi-professional, multi-disciplinary, national planning body charged with carrying out a comprehensive and coordinated national health workforce policy. National healthcare reform cannot be realized without effective national health workforce reform.
Op-Ed: A Social Democrat Weighs in on a Government Health Plan
I was born into a Berkeley family of Social Democrats—my father studied Swedish economic policies—then I trained in social-democratic Economics in Scandinavia, before cutting my career teeth in a Norwegian Labor Party think tank. I thereby personify the threat trumpeted by Republicans: the sinister spread of Social Democracy.
So I am cheering wildly for establishing a federally owned health plan, right? Wrong.
Not that I’m particular opposed, either: It’s just not a big deal. Either way, new government-run plan or not, there won’t be much impact on our nation’s enormous health care problems. Our health care dilemmas—high costs, poor access, and mediocre outcomes–stem from much more fundamental issues than who sits on the board of yet another insurance plan.
These include the perverse incentive structures for key decision makers in the industry, including insurers, providers and patients. Insurers earn money by serving the well rather than the ill who need their assistance most, providers don’t become rich by managing care over time but by medically over-treating the critically sick, and consumers are incented to both stay out of the insurance pool until they’re sick and to seek medical help late.Continue reading…
A Dream of Reason
The dream of reason did not take power into account…Modern medicine is one of those extraordinary works of reason…But medicine is also a world of power.
-Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 1984
Today’s unveiling of a Declaration of Health Data Rights is an important action, long overdue, that represents a collaborative effort by a group of health care professionals – activists, entrepreneurs, technologists and clinicians – all colleagues we hold in high esteem.
The Declaration’s several points arise from a single, simple premise: that patients own their own data, and that that ownership cannot be pre-empted by a professional or an institution. And there lies its power, especially in the context of early 21st Century health care. It is a transformative ideal that currently is not the norm. But we join our colleagues in declaring that it should be.Continue reading…
Time to Revisit Wyden-Bennett?
With the Washington insiders at politico.com
reporting this weekend that health care reform appears to be in “real
jeopardy,” and the Senate Finance Committee so uneasy that they have
decided to delay reform bill markup until after the July Fourth recess,
it’s increasingly clear that an approach of layering more and more
fixes onto the present system isn’t going to work.
