This is a weird one. Quality ratings company HealthGrades has been awarded $3.6m in a breach of agreement from benefits consulting giant Hewitt. Was Hewitt going to use Healthgrades ratings and then decided that no one cared? Anyone got any ideas or information?
TECH/CONSUMERS: Quality, Cost and Connected Health by Joseph Kvedar
Joseph C. Kvedar, MD is the Director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners
Healthcare System in Boston. Given that so many organizations are talking about Connected Health in one flavor or another, I thought it might be interesting if he gave his view of where it would go and what it means for health care quality.
Connected health is the use of messaging and monitoring technologies to bring care to where the patient is, when the patient needs it. This approach has enormous opportunity to increase quality while lowering the overall cost of care. Early returns on this approach are quite encouraging. We are starting to weave connected health into the fabric of our health care system, with good results.
Is There a Doctor in the House?
The growth in the number of patients with chronic illness has outpaced our growth in provider capacity. We talk publicly about nursing shortages and, in private, policy makers and healthcare executives acknowledge that there are physician shortages too. Just ask your primary care doctor how he/she is doing these days, and you’ll get a reality check on how stressed that part of our workforce is. We have no choice but to rethink today’s model of care delivery, where a patient comes to the doctor’s location for care when the doctor has time to see her. Technology makes it possible for physicians and other clinical workers, as well as patients themselves, to take part in continuous healthcare, where data collection and feedback are more frequent and more complete. The sharing of this information between patients and providers can take place in any number of ways thanks to the availability of inexpensive communications technologies.
Let’s take blood pressure as an example. Most physicians who manage blood pressure do so on a few – and often as few as two – readings per year taken in the doctor’s office. With simple, inexpensive technology it’s possible to take blood pressure readings daily or more often and present the doctor with a trended report on how blood pressure is varying and what aspects of the patient’s life impact the readings. Once that richness of data is in hand, why travel to the office for a medication refill? Why not do the whole thing online? Further, the immediacy of information in this type of model allows patients to self-manage through diet, exercise or lifestyle decisions as never before, preventing exacerbations of their condition or the onset of complications that would necessitate intensified use of healthcare resources.
TECH/CONSUMERS: JSK on banks moving into health care
Banks Morph Into Health IT Engines. Go read.
BLOGS/CONSUMERS: Amy, #1, stars at Medscape
Amy Tenderich, #1 health care blogger, stars over at Medscape in Know Your Numbers, Outlive Your Diabetes: An Expert Interview,
TECH/CONSUMERS: Health2.0 mashup site of the week
User reported data about who is sick, where and when. The site thinks that it’s likely to help people figure out whether they’re sick or whether they jsut have something that’s going around. I have zero idea whether that’s useful or whether this is the eventual use of the site. But an interesting concept indeed. Go play around.
CONSUMERS: Interested in doing a book review?
Citiria Publishing is looking for a reviewer for a patient self-help book, "Heart Bypass – The Road Map".
Please contact clive ‘at’ citiria.com. If it’s good I’ll print the review here.
HEALTH PLANS/CONSUMERS/POLICY: Administrative costs–bad and will get worse with CDHPs
PNC Bank has a new survey out saying that 30% of all health care costs are to do with administration—actually it may be more than that if you believe the study in Health Affairs that said it was 20-22% of all provider costs, when the public provider payer segment is keeping an additional 3–20% of all the dollars too. I think that PNC is trying to promote HSAs et al, and perhaps wants to suggest that this will solve the administration problem. As I’ve been saying for a while, the current set up of CHDPs just means that instead of chasing down health plans for the money, providers will be turned into consumer collection agencies.
And PNCs own survey shows that most providers agree with me:
Nearly three-quarters of hospital executives surveyed (72 percent) expect high deductible health plans, which require consumers to pay more upfront costs for care out of their own pockets, to add another layer of complexity to the claims, billing and payment process.
PODCAST/CONSUMERS/TECH: Interview with MaryAnn Stump CEO, Consumer Aware–HealthFacts.org
This is the transcript of my interview last month with MaryAnn Stump CEO, Consumer Aware. Consumer Aware is the BCBS Minnesota subsidiary that puts out the web site HealthCareFacts.org which ranks and rates hospitals and clinics. Unfortunately I had some technical problems with this podcast recoding, but 95% of what Mary Ann was saying is here—and she said a lot! The original audio podcast is here
Matthew Holt: This is Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog, and I’m back with another podcast on the blog. Today I’m very excited that I’m talking with Mary Ann Stump, who is, among her many other titles, the president of Consumer Aware. Which, Mary Ann, you’ll explain to us, is a subsidiary of Blue Cross of Minnesota. Tell us a bit more about what you do, and about what else you’re doing at Blue Cross of Minnesota.
Mary Ann Stump: Ok. Well first of all, good to talk with you Matthew. I appreciate the opportunity. About a year and a half or so ago…I’ve been working with Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota for about 16 years now. About a year and a half ago, when I had been working diligently in this whole space of consumer information‑‑that became known more formally as "transparency"‑‑our CEO and I were talking one day. I said, "You know, I think we really need a team. Sort of a garage type of situation, a learning laboratory where we can really start devoting‑‑with a particular number of people that have an interest in advancing a whole vision around effective and useful consumer information‑‑ someplace where we can sort of work on this in addition to thinking about the business the way that it is today."
We had an affiliate organization that essentially was doing managed‑care tools. Really as you know, the whole managed‑care movement is not only changing significantly, but I think the kinds of things we were doing historically are not the kinds of things that we’re going to need as far as the future is concerned.What he suggested was: Why don’t we take that particular affiliate organization‑‑that I like to think about as a garage so to speak‑‑and say let’s set off deliberately to start to look at how we were going to do things differently as far as consumer information is concerned. Based not only on what we know but where we want to start to see people moving. From being the usual recipient approach to health care and really with the consumer at the center, being customers of care. What are the kinds of tools we would develop in that regard? I’d already been working on a couple things, and so essentially we formalized not only the expectations but the opportunity to be able to accelerate that. So Consumer Aware was born.
CONUSMERS/HEALTH PLANS: ‘Consumer-Driven Guy’ Charged With Embezzling Millions in HSA Funds
Fraud and embezzlement by someone pushing HSAs? Who could possibly have imagined that type of character would be attracted to the business?
CONSUMERS/TECH: Interesting online/offline collaboration
This is an interesting online/offline collaboration between Carepages, which lets patients create websites and Sharedbook, which now allows them to be published in book form.
