I hadn’t heard this quote from Esther Dyson describing Health 2.0 before. She puts it very well.
What we heard today was to me something like the mobile phone system;
it kind of snuck in quietly. It didn’t say it was going to replace the
landline phones. It just appeared.
Pre-registration for the next Health 2.0 conference is now open. The exact location and date for this March event must remain a closely-guarded state secret for now, but expect an official announcement from the Health 2.o team soon. September’s conference sold out weeks before the event, so if you want the best odds of obtaining a pass, you probably should take the two minutes it takes to go sign up. If you attended the September 20th event in San Francisco, all you need do is email in**@********on.com with "I want to come to the next one" in the body of your email. Meanwhile, if you missed the September event in San Francisco, we will shortly be making an 8 DVD box with highlights of the Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare conference available for sale. Just send us an email with "I want the DVD in your subject line." We will provide details on pricing and shipping options when copies are available to ship.
I’ve observed the incessant complaints on various cancer blogs and discussion boards about BC/BS "denial of coverage" on the backs of injured and diseased human beings during their fight with the great crab.
In one case, the patient was denied a CT scan. As the poster said, "because BC/BS is practicing medicine and deciding that such a thing is not medically necessary." Without the CT scan, there was no way for the doctor to definitively tell if a swollen leg is cancer related or a blood clot. The physician couldn’t make a diagnosis based on the best available technique to make that diagnosis.
Another poster presented the case that BC/BS used to cover Pet Scans. Unfortunately, some study came out stating that Pet Scans aren’t more effective than CT Scans to find colon cancer. With that one study, BC/BS had decided not to cover the Pet Scan, even against the physician protest.
I’ve been told that I make “vicious ad hominem attacks” about people I disagree with on matters of substance. So I thought it would be fun to show what some other luminaries say. See if you can guess who wrote this and who they’re talking about—yes both in the same long article and both people with similar roles and titles:
XXX XXX is a professor at XXXX Business School and the thought leader on consumer driven health care in the United States. XXX is the author or editor of three books that laid out the intellectual foundation for the consumer empowerment movement: (book titles redacted). XXX is a frequent and popular lecturer on all aspects of health care reform, and serves on the Boards of some of the most innovative health care companies in America.
Oops missed submitting! But at the Healthcare Economist Health Wonk Review is up.
Overtreated is a marvelous new book by Shannon Brownlee. Shannon is a former US News & World Report health reporter, and now is a Fellow at the New America Foundation (that’s the centrist third way Clintonite Dem one). In the book she’s essentially trying to channel Jack Wennberg for the masses, and you all know how important that is.
I spoke to her about the book, changing the perception about what Americans think about the power of medicine, and how journalists haven’t got much chance of changing what they write about health. It was a great conversation.
THCB contributor Maggie Mahar returns today with another of her insightful pieces on the business of healthcare. If you haven’t yet done so, you are hereby commanded – yes, as in that’s an order – you should go pick up your copy of Money Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare costs so much, Maggie’s recent study of the forces at work in the healthcare marketplace.
Consider
this: In the San Francisco area, a nurse with a bachelor’s degree can
hope to start out with a salary of $104,000. The salary for a nursing
professor with a Ph.D. at University of California San Francisco starts
at about $60,000.
This goes a long way toward explaining why nursing schools turned
away 42,000 qualified applications in 2006-2007—even as U.S. hospitals
scramble to find nurses. We don’t have enough teachers in nursing
schools and the fact that the average nursing professor is nearly 59
while the average assistant professor is about 52 suggests that, as
they retire, the shortage could turn into a crisis. The most recent issue of JAMA (October
10, 1007) reports that in 2005 we had 218,800 fewer nurses than we
needed and by 2012, it’s estimated that we’ll be short some 1 million
nurses.
Hospitals have had to raise nursing salaries (as well they should),
not just because nurses are scarce but because, in our chaotic hospital
system, the work can be extraordinarily stressful.
Nurses know better than anyone just how many “adverse events” occur each day –even in the most prestigious U.S. hospitals.
“I’m terrified of killing someone,” one young nurse confided to me
about a year ago. After working in a hospital in Bermuda for a number
of years, she was bored, and had come back to work in New York, where
she had friends and family. She had worked in New York before, but she
wasn’t at all sure that she would stay. “In our hospitals, it’s just
too crazy,” she said.
Her story also sheds light on why nursing professors are willing to
work for $60,000 a year when they could, no doubt, more than double
their salaries if they were willing to wade into the fray at local
hospitals.
Continue reading post at HealthBeat
Monday’s announcement that Sermo, the social
networking site for doctors, is teaming up with Pfizer has left the company one
of the most-talked about tech startups in the country. In this clip from
September’s Health 2.0 conference, Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant introduces his
company’s business model and walks viewers on a guided tour through the Sermo
web site , talking about the reasons "the wisdom of crowds" promises
to be a potent force in medicine.
The goal of the ASTM CCR Training Workshop is to give developers and
programmers in Health2.0, as well as traditional health IT, a "deep
dive" into the CCR standard, its schema, and current uses of the CCR
for portability and interoperability of health information exchange.
For those who don’t know about the CCR standard, it is an easily
implemented and widely adopted XML schema for capturing a "snapshot" of
a person’s most relevant health information, such as demographics,
diagnoses and problems, medications, allergies, immunizations, family
history, and care plans. It is an open and royalty-free standard
sponsored by numerous physician and medical organizations, including
the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family
Physicians. Information on the next ASTM CCR Training Workshop can be
found on the home page of www.ccrstandard.com. David C. Kibbe, MD MBA and Steven Waldren, MD are faculty for the one-day workshop.
Laptop-attached ultrasound units that produce startlingly clear internal images for five dollars in the field. Organs that re-generate inside scaffolds. Drugs tailored to an individual’s biology. Micro-images of cancerous cells lit up by bio-chemical markers. Decision support tools that scan the physiological values in electronic health records for patterns too complex to be detected by an unaided clinician.
The advances available from dramatic improvements in computational capabilities were a recurring theme at the Aspen Health Forum, with experts from each discipline describing where the technology was leading us. I attended two sessions featuring Star Trek clips that predicted realities now within at least theoretical reach. (Prescient and corny, audiences nodded nostalgically.) Sessions on biotechnology, imaging, electronic health records (EHRs) and the hospital of the future highlighted the power that is being leveraged to improve care.
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