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POLICY/PHARMA: DEA’s insane persecution of pain patients continues

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Just in case you needed to be reminded that the DEA is a refuge of evil scumbags and needs to be abolished, here’s another exhibit (from the good people at DRCNet):

Federal agents arrested Dr. Stephen Schneider, operator of the Schneider Medical Clinic, and his wife and business manager, Linda, on a 34-count indictment charging them with operating a "pill mill" at their clinic. The indictment charges that Schneider and his assistants "unlawfully" wrote prescriptions for narcotic pain relievers, that at least 56 of Schneiders’ patients died of drug overdoses between 2002 and 2007, and that Schneider and his assistants prescribed pain relievers "outside the course of usual medical practice and not for legitimate medical purpose."

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BLOGS: Vote rigging? No, not in the primaries…

Accusations of malfeasance, fraud, vote-rigging and corruption — about an awards show which doesn’t even have an interesting category (still no "Worst health care blog" category despite my pleas to be in it)! and which is sponsored by a blog which itself caused one of the more interesting blogging scandals of 2007.

I love it. Surely Entertainment Tonight is around the corner, what with the writers strike and all….

(None of this detracts from the fact that the big winner Paul Levy has a great blog which we are happy to feature here on THCB)

QUALITY: Medicare Health Support–Done and more or less dusted

Recently the targets on Medicare Health Support were changed to make them more financially favorable to the DM companies running the projects. Everyone inside the DM industry has known that MHS has not been doing too well for some time now. But now according to Vince Kuratis’ blog, the preparations to pull the plug are well underway. Here’s Vince’s interpretation of CMS’ decidely low-key announcement of where MHS stands.

MHS is not meeting targets for financial savings.  While it is theoretically possible that the MHS program could climb out of the hole financially during the remaining months of the program, we are doubtful that this will happen — so much so that we are scheduling the patient’s (MHS’) funeral even though technically we are not allowed to pronounce the patient dead yet. In the event that hell freezes over and the program revives, we will then schedule Phase II, but don’t hold your breath.

In a new twist on an old saying by Mark Twain: The rumors of MHS’ death have NOT been greatly exaggerated.

POLICY: Plumpy’nut – Brian

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The NY Times ran an important op-ed yesterday by Susan Shepherd, a pediatrician and medical advisor to Doctors Without Borders.
The core of her message is that as the farm bill progresses through
Congress, we should focus not only on the quantity of food that is
produced and that we export for relief to underdeveloped nations, but
on its quality as well.

Dr. Shepherd describes the difficulties
in treating children who are victims of severe malnutrition,
particularly in areas like Africa and South Asia where milk and clean
water can be scarce.

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HEALTH 2.0/TECH: Collective intelligence in AthenaHealth

Scott Shreeve has spent much of his career promoting open source as a way to
harvest collective intelligence. But (irritated by a description from a knocker)
he’s done a great job at defining one shining example of a network that
becomes more intelligent as more data (and nodes) get plugged into it. And that
network is a private SaaS company, AthenaHealth.

This is a great example of two of O’Reillys constituents of Web 2.0, especially
the second one:

  1. Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability that
    get richer as more people use them
  2. Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as
    more people use them

Now of course that control over data is in a private network. And
it’s not an open source project. but the point is AthenaHealth is using that
business positioning to add features and gets more powerful as the company adds more
clients.

THCB Reader

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The Omnimedix Institute’s JD Kleinke wrote in to comment on the thread triggered by last week’s news on the dossia project, a story that came out when Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott revealed new details of the retail giant’s plans to work with major employers to help them cut healthcare costs in his annual January address to the company’s managers and other employees in Kansas City. Scott’s plan provoked the usual skeptical response from critics in the blogosphere and the media, but JD had this to say:    

"Omnimedix is currently in the process of resolving a legal dispute with Wal-Mart and the other Dossia corporations regarding the development and operation of the Dossia PHR system. And while this dispute has been an annoyance for us and no doubt for Wal-Mart, I’d like to make it clear that we support Wal-Mart’s overall health care ambitions, which involve not only PHRs for their own employees, but an expansion of health benefits for those employees, and the creation of a modern, affordable, accessible health care delivery system.  Think whatever you want about this oft-vilified mega-retailer; Wal-Mart has the singular ability to bring a low-cost, low-friction, high-value, high-access alternative to health care delivery in the U.S., one we have desperately needed for decades." 

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HEALTH PLANS: WellCare…killing health care some more?

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After last Fall’s FBI raid the top management at Wellcare resigned on Friday. The board is hoping that the new CEO, former United executive Charles Berg, will right the ship. After all who could we trust more than the WellCare board to guarantee that the taxpayer and patients will have their affairs conducted in proper and decent order. Because there’s no chance that anyone on the WellCare board has ever taken advantage of their position in order to simply cash in, oh wait….

Well then surely there’s no chance that the three senior execs who resigned are the three who also sold millions in stock a few months before the FBI raids, is there? Oh it was them? That’s a surprise–and what about that other board member who also cashed in big time?

I guess I’ll check the comments section on this post to get Reggie’s  explanation…

PODCAST/HEALTH 2.0: Interview with Tony Miller, Carol

One of the most interesting new Health 2.0 companies is Carol–a Minnesota start-up that is aiming at the heart of the health care system. It’s trying to create "care packages" that will in the end (if it works) change how people buy care, and how providers organize to deliver it.

Ambitious and very interesting stuff. In one of the first interviews with Carol CEO Tony Miller since their launch last week, I asked him what the company was hoping to do and why he felt that they had a shot at changing the world! Here’s the interview part 1 & part 2

assetto corsa mods