Best health care in the world? Apparently even the Bush Administration has given up on that line. Here’s what Mike Leavitt had to say yesterday.
The U.S. healthcare system is fundamentally broken, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard University on Tuesday night, Leavitt advocated for a complete overhaul of the overly complex and inefficient current system.
Far cry from the President’s words over the past 7 years.
At the end of Health2.0 Conference Marty Tenenbaum asked if there was interest in forming a group to accelerate Health2.0. Earlier this was written up on THCB as though it was another standards group. But that’s not entirely what Marty meant. He explains here:
I’m eager to follow up on the creation of an industry initiative to accelerate the Health 2.0 vision. This organization would do for ehealth what CommerceNet did for ecommerce by catalyzing the market. The Blog posting focused on standards. While standards are important, so is evangelism, business development, lobbying, and especially visionary integration projects that demonstrate the potential of Health 2.0 for improving people’s lives.
Early CommerceNet members included startups like Netscape, Yahoo, and Amazon as well as established organizations like Visa/Mastercard, FedEx and IBM. The members of CommerceNet collaborated on initiatives like search, catalogs, security, payment, and shipping/fulfillment, leading to complete end-end transactions where one could actually locate a product, buy it, pay for it and get it delivered. Not only was overall market growth accelerated; many business deals resulted, generating a lot of wealth.
The parallels with Health 2.0 are obvious. Like the days of ecommerce, many energetic entrepreneurs are exploring the seemingly limitless opportunities and obstacles of a huge and important market. Each provides useful but highly fragmented data or services (e.g.,PHRs, search, patient and doctor communities). Aggregating data across communities and integrating services into complete solutions (e.g., selecting the best treatment or physician for you) is much more valuable to consumers and essential if we’re actually going to impact healthcare in meaningful ways.
Everyone interested should move on this as soon as possible to capitalize on the momentum of the amazing conference.
To get involved, you can email **********@******ce.net“>he********@******ce.net and of course comment here.
Meanwhile, if you missed Health 2.0 User-Generated Healthcare San Francisco, you have a number of options available to you. This morning we are officially opening pre-registration for the next Health 2.0 over at the Health 2.0 site. To satisfy our communications team, the exact location and date must
remain a closely-guarded state secret, but an announcement will be made
shortly. If you think you might want to come, you may want to consider joining the waiting list. You’ll also get news of potential early bird discounts, break out events and information about rates for start ups. (Attendees at Health 2.0 can skip the arduous process of filling out the form and send us an email with "I want to come to the next one" in their subject line.) We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
THCB welcomes first time contributor Jeff Goldsmith of Health Futures. Jeff will be blogging for us on a periodic basis, so expect more insightful commentary from him in the near future. Among those in the know, Jeff has long been considered a leading futurist. From 1982 to 1994, Jeff served as National Advisor for Healthcare at Ernst & Young. From 1980 to 1990 he was a lecturer at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He currently serves on the editorial board of Health Affairs.
Last week, the Kaiser Family
Foundation released its annual Employer Health Benefits Survey, which
revealed that premiums for employer sponsored health insurance rose
only 6.1% for 2007, compared with almost a 14% increase in 2003.
One would not have known that this is actually good news from KFF President
Drew Altman’s comments, however: “No-one in the real world is celebrating
because it doesn’t feel like moderation”. He went on to say
that “we’ve seen these periods of moderation before, and they never
last.” The Report also showed that the percentage of employers
offering coverage remained stable for the third year in a row, as did
the percentage contribution workers had to make for individual and family
plans.
Altman is certainly right that
health cost growth will eventually resume- he’s the author of a famous
Grand Teton-like exhibit which shows the cyclical flare-ups in employer
costs over the last 45 years. But it is not clear what “real
world” Dr. Altman is thinking about. For people who actually
meet payrolls every week (my definition of the “real world”), a
56% reduction in the growth rate of one of their most explosive costs
of doing business in four years time is nothing short of phenomenal
good news.
The difference between the
2003 and 2007 premium increase on a roughly $800 billion health premium
base is $62 billion in new corporate cash flow, money that can
be used to increase wages, invest in R+D or new plant, or hire
additional workers. (And sure enough, in Kaiser Foundation’s
own data, wage increases grew from about 2% on 2004 to almost 4% in
2007).
What has produced this cost
moderation is still not clear. My theory is that increased
cost sharing has, over a number of years, compelled families to be more
careful about their use of health services. That is not inherently
a bad thing. Despite these increases, out-of-pocket share of health
costs continued to fall through 2005, according to CMS’ Office
of the Actuary.
There’s another excellent summary of the day from Rebecca Vesley at Modern Healthcare Online.
And there’s more up at ICYou, including Indu’s concluding selection of “great quotes from the day”.
Let’s take you on a quick tour of the blogosphere, and take in some reaction to Health2.0
Writing at that uber blog, the HuffPo, Esther Dyson says some very nice things and then gives a version of her really interesting summary remarks in Release 0.9: Health2.1 — Afterthoughts on the Wonderful Health 2.0 Conference
Archana Dubey at HealDeal was particularly enthralled by the virtual physician lounges of Sermo & Within3
Christopher Parks and his Change:Healthcare team were celebrating their Series A, and meeting lots of people at Health2.0 where they really liked the Organized Wisdom approach of searching user-generated content.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn who did a marvellous job preparing for and running the first panel, shares her perspective on the whole day at her new blog Health Populi. Jane’s words “Health 2.0 is not a conference or a meeting or a thing: it’s a movement. It has to do with changing behavior, sharing, bringing all stakeholders into the process–especially people, and co-producing health care”
The Praxeon guys looked good on the search panel…and they wanted to make sure that the world knows. And why not.
The Diabetch blog has a nice summary of my opening concept, although I’m not sure I’m the “founder” of the movement—Indu and I are perhaps hosts of a conversation bazzar.
Fard Johnmar at HealthCareVox has a brief piece on the conference. Look for more great stuff from Fard on his excellent interview series “The Digital Health Revolution”
Blaine Anderson and the PointClear Solutions folks captured the first part of the day well on their blog
Health care law blogger Bob Coffield has a long and very detailed post on the whole conference, including a summary of his unconference table. There were 15 of those, BTW!
#1 health care blogger Amy Tenderich not only ran a great panel on Social Media (of which her blog Diabetes mine is perhaps the best pure blog example) but also summarized her take on the whole day, in a voice aimed at patients.
Joerg Schwarz from Sun had some interesting comments on what was there (user-generated healthcare) and what wasnt really there—connections to back end data systems.
Jack Beaudoin from Healthcare IT News blog wins the prize for best title! H may have thought that the opening video was a bit self-congratulory, but he seems to have like the Rock’n’Roll hipster atmosphere. I guess when one host is a failed rock guitarist and the other one is married to a successful hipster DJ & musician, that’s what you get!
RHRVentures blog liked what they saw too.
Tobin & Rebecca from iMedExchange sponsored the unconference (Thanks guys!) and are looking forward to even more of a physician focus next time.
Francine Hardaway at Arizona Health Futures has a great run down of the day—Perhaps most interesting is that her unconference lunch table about data liquidity had Adam Bosworth involved. His view? If we admit the patient really owns the data, then everything else will flow from that.
Usable Markets has my second favorite title about the conference Health Hoopla
That lot should get you started!
If you want to know who actually was at Health2.0 you can download a list of attendees by name here and by company here. If you want to connect with anyone the best bet is to visit the vibrant FaceBook group. Or you can contact Matthew or Indu for a specific introduction
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