Tag: Uncategorized

AMA and AHIP go head to head with TV ads

Jul 2, 2008• 3

By Sarah Arnquist

The American Medical Association this week began a television ad campaign, lambasting Republican Senators who failed to prevent the July 1 automatic 10.6 percent Medicare physician fee cut.

In the one-minute ad, AMA President Nancy Nielsen says, "A group of Senators decided it was more important to protect the health insurers than seniors."

Just as Robert Laszewski predicted here last week, the doctors are coming out in full lobbying force.

But wait. The Association of Health Insurance Plans is also running ads filled with nice looking seniors saying that to protect seniors Congress must protect the Medicare Advantage program.

Who is a senior taking 10 prescription medications for six chronic diseases with a calendar full of doctor’s appointments to believe?

Here are the ads.

We need to make some changes to change health care

Jul 2, 2008• 5

By Charlie Baker

Charlie Baker is the president and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc., a nonprofit health plan that covers more than 1 million New Englanders. Baker blogs regularly at Let’s Talk Health Care.

One of the reasons the operating model in health care doesn’t change much over time is pretty simple: most of the people who think about it, write about it, work in it and study it have trouble seeing the model any differently than they see it today. I was struck, therefore, by Hebrew Senior Life’s Len Fishman the other day when he and I served on a panel at the 30th annual meeting of the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium. We were told to discuss health care 30 years from now — me from the plan perspective, and Len from the long term care perspective. I went pretty far out there in my remarks, imagining, among other things, a world in which there were no health plans at all(!). Len did too. His presentation on the future of long term care could not have looked more different than what we have today. He literally re-imagined the whole thing. It was startling — and refreshing.

This question — is the future just like the past, or something different — was raised again for me earlier this week when Brian Rosman — a good guy with whom I almost never agree — posted a blog on the Health Care for All Web site that basically said that more publicly available information on health care cost and quality could/might/will lead to higher costs and higher prices, because no one really cares about costs, and if they do, they’ll flock to higher cost options, because they’ll think they’re better than lower cost ones.

Google Health and the PHR: Do Consumers Care?

Jul 1, 2008• 28

By Keith Schorsch Keith_2

Google Health’s unveiling last week and Microsoft’s HealthVault launch last October
are important milestones in the evolution of Health 2.0. Both of these heavyweights have the resources and potential to improve the health consumer’s customer experience. I have followed the active (and important) conversations about privacy concerns, HIPAA, and Google Health’s terms of service, which are well represented by Erik Schonfeld’s post on Techcrunch and Larry Dignan’s post on ZDnet. And I read with interest Google’s rapid response offered by Google Senior Product Counsel Mark Yang.

What’s missing from all of these conversations is the elephant in the room: Do consumers really care about having online personal health records?

Dispatch from India: Private sector responding to new health care consumers

Jul 1, 2008• 5

By Jay Srinivasan

Editor’s note: The current issue of Health Affairs released next week
focuses on health care in India and China.

As with most parameters within the Indian economy these days, the health care industry is huge but that doesn’t tell you much.

The fact is that health care in India is a broken system whose fault lines are fast being papered over by the rapidity of change, influx of big capital, drive of entrepreneurship and the relative ease of staking positions and targeting opportunity in an economy on fire. Combine that with the government’s involuntary relinquishing of idealistic heights due to resource constraints and its abysmal record and you get an industry that is overwhelmingly in the hands of the private sector. Maybe the private sector can redeem the industry after six decades with little to show by the government.

Drug advertisements annoying and possibly misleading

Jun 30, 2008• 9

By Sean Neill

Sean Neill is a South African-born, British-trained anesthesiologist, who
recently relocated to Midwestern USA. He blogs regularly at OnMedica about his cross-cultural experience, frequently pointing out oddities of American health care.

Watching television in America takes some getting used to. Apart from the accent, it is strange to hear companies marketing drugs directly to the consumer. Not only do they sell their own brand, but they actively name and shame their competitors’ products. During a commercial break there may be two different brands of antihistamine telling you how bad the other is.

Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) is the promotion of prescription drugs through newspaper, magazine, television and internet marketing. Although the drug industry is mounting major campaigns to have DTCA allowed in Europe and Canada, the only two developed countries where it is currently legal are the U.S. and New Zealand.

Studies have shown that increases in DTCA have contributed to overall
increases in spending on both the advertised drug itself and on other
drugs that treat the same conditions. For example, one study of 64
drugs found a median increase in sales of $2.20 for every $1 spent on
DTCA. It has been reported that 10 of the leading 12 brand-name drugs
with DTCA campaigns have sales in excess of $1 billion annually.

Lots of Health 2.0 articles indicates that it’s heating up

Jun 25, 2008• 2

By Matthew Holt

I don’t know if it’s just me, but there appears to be a quick vogue in round-ups of the Health 2.0 world at the moment.

UCLA doc John Luo wrote about******@**ng.com&utm_campaign=06.17.08+l+MDNG+Anesthesiology/PM+eDigest:+Futuristic+Medicine;+Cultural+Competency&utm_source=Listrak&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=/articles/PC_Taking_the_Wheel?utm_source=Listrak&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=%2Farticles%2FPC%5FTaking%5Fthe%5FWheel&utm_content=sjohnson%40mdng%2Ecom&utm_campaign=06%2E17%2E08+l+MDNG+Anesthesiology%2FPM+eDigest%3A+Futuristic+Medicine&utm_content=je******************@***oo.com&utm_campaign=06.24.08+l+MDNG+Pediatrics+eDigest:+Premature+Births+Up;+Pregnancy+and+Child+Obesity”> The People and Companies Driving Health 2.0 on MNDG. He gives a good overview, and mentions some familiar and not too familiar names

In the slightly more rarefied atmosphere of the American Academy of Neurology, Barbara Scherokman of Kaiser Permanente, and Michael Segal, from SimulConsult, give a great overview of the components in Health 2.0 for Neurologists. They focus alot of course on BrainTalk and PatientsLikeMe.

Talking of PatientsLikeMe, I missed this due to being in the Jordanian desert at the time, but in March Wired’s Tom Goetz (who was on a panel in the March 2007 Health 2.0 conference) wrote a fantastic and long article about PatientsLikeMe called Practicing Patients for the New York Times in March. I learned alot and I’ve been giving PLM demos in public for the last year (and no, I’m not a shareholder!)

The people at at nursing online education database bombard me with their posts, but this one about Taking Control of Your Health Records throws in everything including the kitchen sink, but has some interesting links.

At ReadWriteWeb, Richard MacManus has been looking at DiabetesMine and DiabeticConnect. Not surprising as he’s a geek who recently discovered that he had diabetes.

Meanwhile Indu Subaiya and I have been diving into the latest rash of companies wanting to present at Health 2.0. Just 12 months ago we were scratching around to come up with enough candidates to fill four demo panels. Now we have 20 panels and we don’t have enough room to show half of the people who want to present.

It won’t stay like this for ever of course, but it’s interesting to be in the middle of the maelstrom!

Expanding consumer ratings to home caregivers

Jun 25, 2008• 4

By Chiara Bell

It seems that everyone is chasing after doctor and hospital ratings. From Revolution Health to Yelp, consumers are encouraged to rate hospitals and physicians in their communities. Hospitals and physicians are the two obvious providers to rate in our health care system. However, I think we have left out, the largest and, arguably the most important members of the health care profession — nurses, certified caregivers and home health aides.

Let’s compare the numbers.

Today, there are approximately 4,927 community hospitals and an average of 800,000 licensed physicians in the United States. Comparatively, there are 1.4 million registered nurses, 749,000 licensed practical nurses, and 1.8 million certified nursing assistants, home health aides and non-certified caregivers.

That is roughly 4.1 Million members of the health care community that we have left out of the ratings game.

How preventing infections rose to the forefront of the patient safety movement

Jun 24, 2008• 1

By Bob Wachter Robert_wachter

The Joint Commission just released its 2009 National Patient Safety Goals, and –- no surprise –- they focus on infection prevention. While this seems natural today, it wasn’t always so. In fact, the conflation of infection control and patient safety is one of the most surprising twists of the patient safety revolution.

The inclusion – make that dominance – of infection prevention in the safety field was anything but preordained. The IOM Report on medical errors, which sparked the modern patient safety movement, mentions the word “infections” 8 times and the word “medications” 234 times. In other words, the Founding Fathers of patient safety didn’t appear to have preventing infections in mind when they articulated the scope of the endeavor.

So how did it come to pass that infection prevention became one of, if not the, central focus of the patient safety enterprise? The first step was recognition of the importance of measurement. Without measurable rates of adverse events, there could be no public reporting, no research demonstrating improvements, no pay for performance (or, more au currant, “no pay for errors” – note that more than half of the “no pay” entities on CMS’s present and proposed list are infections), and ultimately no one who could be held accountable for progress in safety.

Whose DNA is it anyway?

Jun 23, 2008• 3

By Sarah Arnquist Dna

News of the California Health Department’s mailing of cease and desist letters to 13 direct-to-consumer genetic testing firms, such as 23andMe, Navigenics and DeCodeMe, has sparked intense debate over balancing regulations to guarantee quality and individual rights to genetic data.

Here on THCB, Matthew Holt called the move the "first establishment challenge of Health 2.0."

"This is a case where the regulations are running way behind the technology, and the trade protection organizations of health care providers are, I’m sure, whispering in the ear of the regulators," Holt wrote.

Why all the fuss now?

CA regulators say doctors must be involved in ordering and deciphering the genetic tests, which currently are offered directly to consumers. Currently, customers pay about
$2,500 at Navigenics for an initial one-year membership — and then an
annual fee of $250.
23andMe and DecodeMe both charge about $1,000 for permanent access.

Diabetes reloaded

Jun 22, 2008

By THCB Staff

To mark the advancements and ongoing journey in diabetic care DiabetesMine, an online community and resource for diabetics, created this video.

The theme, Diabetes Reloaded, stands for "redefining not only the role of technology in managing chronic diseases, but also for the newfound self-confidence and ambitions of 21st century people living with health conditions. What’s special about this new web-enabled world of healthcare? It’s proactive, technology-based, empowered, revolutionary, against all odds, and – if needed – outside the establishment."