American Well, who were big stars at (and sponsors of) the recent Health 2.0 Hawaii symposium have announced the second big Blues to sign on to use their service. It’s Blues of Minnesota, who Health 2.0 watchers know have their own online activity going on with Consumer Aware.
On the other hand, I’m not so sure that I’ll be keen to go the next regional Health 2.0 meeting if it’s held in winter in Minneapolis….
In a blog piece called Why Republicans Should Back Universal Health Care Regina Herzlinger says something that I more or less agree with. Switzerland’s system isn’t a bad option. Neither for that matter is Holland’s. Now of course Maggie Mahar has debunked Herzlinger’s notion that there isn’t state regulation of insures and providers in those systems. And Regi also talks a lot of tosh about Medicare, the UK and the evils of the government in the same piece. But I guess she feels she has to do that to keep whatever’s left of her audience (that would be the four Republicans who care about health care, rather than the health care business types who have moved on in pursuit of who now holds the purse strings).
But I’m just left with one little question. Where’s Herzlinger’s mea culpa to Alain Enthoven? After all he’s been promoting the Dutch answer (he basically designed it) since 1978 or thereabouts. And I don’t recall Herzlinger mentioning that in the numerous times she’s been slamming managed competition and its father.
Americans believe that scientific evidence is not always clear when differentiating between different treatment options for their health.Yesterday, as I moderated the the kick-off Great Debate session of the Health 2.0 Conference, co-hosted by the Center for Information Therapy in Boston, I felt this was a key tension between the fields of Health 2.0 — the use of web 2.0 tools in health, especially among health citizens — and Information Therapy, which aims to 'prescribe' the right information at the right time for the right patient in the process of care.The public belief in scientific uncertainty statistic comes from the latest NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health poll, The Public and the Health Care Delivery System.Don Kemper of Healthwise, the guru and proponent of Information Therapy, discoursed with Matthew Holt on the differences and synergies between Ix therapy and Health 2.0. A panel of reactors listened and responded: they were Gilles Frydman of ACOR, Dr. Alan Greene of DrGreene.com, Amy Tenderich of DiabetesMine, and Dr. Ted Eytan of Permanente Foundation. All four of these panelists are on Twitter, all four are active and important voices in their respective websites and blogs, and all four hold deeply passionate visions for Health 2.0.
Deron liked Matthew's interview with athenahealth CEO Jon Bush.
He had this to say about Jon:
"He's an amazing guy with great vision and clarity. If I were starting a practice from scratch, using Athena's platform would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, we've already invested big $$ in one of those standalone systems."
RBaer weighed in on Matthew's morning post, "A Liberal is a Conservative Exposed to the NHS."
"I am actually a former German physician, (I am in the US because my wife is US American), and I can tell you that German physicians, especially hospitalists are underpaid (many physicians in private practice do reasonably well, though). I hear from friends and family that Germany is paying a price for that by seeing many physicians go abroad (England, Switzerland), being replaced by doctors from Eastern European countries who are often faced with language- and cultural barriers."
We live in a time of such great progress in so many arenas that, too often and without a second thought, we take significant advances for granted. But, now and then, we should catalog the steps forward, and then look backward to appreciate how these steps were made possible. They sprung from grand conceptions of possibilities and, then, the persistent focused toil that is required to bring ideas to useful fruition.
We could see this in a relatively quiet announcement this week at HIMSS 09. Microsoft unveiled its “Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) 2009, the next generation release of the enterprise data aggregation platform that enables hospitals to unlock patient data stored in a wide range of systems and make it easily accessible to every authorized member of the team inside and beyond the hospital – including the patient – to help them drive real-time improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of care delivery.”
Carl Hiaasen on efforts to block Florida's new cigarette tax:
"Ellyn Bogdanoff, the Fort Lauderdale Republican who chairs the
Finance and Tax Committee in the House … strongly opposes a
cigarette tax because fewer smokers would be bad for business. The woman is dead serious, folks. In
particular, Bogdanoff worries about the impact that a cigarette tax
would have on convenience stores — not exactly the bedrock of our
economy, but these are the establishments where most young smokers buy
their Marlboros and Camels.''Twenty-two percent of all sales in
convenience stores are cigarettes,'' Bogdanoff said. “We need to look
at everything. If they don't go in to buy cigarettes, they don't buy
the Coke. They don't buy the chips.''And if they don't buy the chips, then they don't buy the beef jerky! God help us!"
By
Now that I’ve reached my mid-50s, I sometimes think about retirement, and to be honest it worries me.
I’m not talking about the typical things you worry about pre-retirement, such as the loss of income or lifestyle changes. I worry about what will happen to my patients.
Why? For the simple reason that it will be hard to replace me. This isn’t my ego talking: there simply aren’t nearly enough new surgeons coming along to replace me – or my other contemporaries, for that matter.
I work in Glasgow, Montana, a town of 3,500 in northeastern Montana that is about as rural as it gets. I serve more than 20,000 patients in an area that runs 100 or more miles in every direction except north past the Canadian border. I’ve been on call essentially every hour of every day since I came to Montana over 20 years ago.
Back in 1995-96, I ran a site out of
my dorm room called Mac-o-mania. It was a collection of interesting
products and tidbits for the Macintosh community. I initially gathered
content myself but as the site's popularity grew I became highly dependent
on people to send me comments, tips and links to keep the site going.
I am a huge believer in the unique ability
of people to take their experiences (failures as well as successes)
and place them, along with other content, onto shelves in their brain.
Innovation is the combination of all those pieces of content in a social
environment shared and combined with other like-minded individuals.
Last June I went to Scott Heiferman’s
Tech meetup and shortly thereafter created the New York Healthcare Technology
Organization using meetup.com platform (thanks Scott!!! – its worth
every penny).
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