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HEALTH 2.0: It’s a sell out!

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I remember first discussing the Health2.0 Conference with my partner Indu Subaiya and saying, "do you think we can get 100 people to come?" Well apparently we misunderestimated ourselves. As of yesterday the Health2.0 Conference has sold out. There’s a waiting list and some final adjustments to be done, but we’re expecting 400 people plus to be there on September 20th.

Thanks to all the speakers, advisory board members, moderators, sponsors, and of course my colleagues Indu, John and Sara, Patrick and Adrienne who have been working their tails off.

If you’re coming we’re really looking forward to seeing you. And if you can’t make this one, we’re already planning the next one in 2008.

POLICY/INTERNATIONAL: The Dutch–Better than the US at football, drug-laws and health care organization

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The Netherlands is a small nation of only 16 million, and yet they have a record in International soccer that’s better than many three times their size. laws about drugs and prostitution that reduce crime, violence and embody toleration, and now they probably have the most advanced health care financing system in the world.

How so? It’s essentially Enthoven’s original managed competition idea in action (circa 1987). Even the Wall Street Journal thinks good things. The key is you need to ban underwriting, and implement risk adjustment (not that it’s easy but it is doable) between plans. Then you have to give the insurer and the insured incentives to realize that the way that population health is managed has ramifications for both the population’s health and its wealth. Then you get rational trade-offs made at a population level.

Can it happen here? I think so, unless you think that Americans cannot handle rational choice. Of course the people who claim to value choice in health care here can’t abide by the concept of the rational structure that the Dutch have put in place which allows choice to be made about the right things. So "choice" here in health care financing means, as the WSJ put it:

In the U.S., competition among insurers often means competition to find
the healthiest customers, especially in the individual market.

But of course if you don’t allow individuals to make the choice of what they spend collectively on a monthly basis to be the point of decision on how much is spent on health care (and put those intermediaries in the middle in the position of benefiting from lowering that amount in the "right" way), then the only other rational allocation is to have the government do it via the tax system.

CODA: I wrote extensively earlier this year on my comparison between the two and how different they both are from typical American notions of competition.

BLOGS: Health Wonk Review up

Brain Klepper has defected back to Pat Salber’s blog to host a great edition of Health Wonk Review. But don’t worry Klepper fans….we’ll have him back here shortly. In fact he’ll be running THCB during the Health2.0 Conference. But if you’re a Pat Salber fan (and why wouldn’t you be?) don’t fret. She’ll be blogging from Health2.0 too.

POLICY: What the lumenati are saying may surprise you

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Forbes has one of those “pics and words” articles about healthcare, with quotes from lots of smart and not-so-smart commenters. But I just thought it would be fun for you to read the quotes and then play the “who really said that” game.  Here are some quotes I picked, not quite at random. After the jump, I reveal who said them with a little commentary

1) We want to get to 100% insurance coverage so the whole country is in the risk pool, which eliminates cherry picking.

2) The old managed competition idea from the Clinton years is still a pretty good one. The idea was to have some entity–employer, private or possibly a public sponsor–set up a menu of choices for people and give them a lot of information about each choice. Then give people a set of choices that range from basic coverage to highly generous, expensive coverage and let them decide how much money they want to spend. Subsidize lower-income people in some way, like refundable tax credits, to ensure people have money to buy good basic coverage, but then they’d have to add their own money if they wanted something more extravagant.

3) We have turned over $2.2 trillion of our money to those who manage our health care, without holding them accountable. Not surprisingly, these folks–hospitals, insurers, governments–used the money to benefit themselves

4) All of the incentives are pointed in the wrong direction.

5) The Medicare program needs to focus on being a more active purchaser. We need to consider an entire episode of care from start to finish to ensure a patient gets care in the most appropriate location … We don’t, at the moment, have a rational reimbursement structure for health care. You may pay more for a procedure at one location, and the quality of care may not be higher. Part of fixing that will take legislation.

6) Spend money on an information infrastructure. Then it would technically be quite possible to track what different hospitals actually spend on health care and what happens to these patients that get treated. Put that information on the web and let people see it to hold doctors and hospitals accountable for how they practice.

7) You need to have a private marketplace rather than have government control in the health care sector, and that means fixing the federal tax code.

You want to know who really said that? Read on:

Continue reading…

HEALTH2.0: Billing and administrative technologies get some publicity

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In yesterday’s WSJ article about billing and admin systems Christopher Parks’ MedBillingManager, RevolutionHealth’s Expense Manager and Intuit’s new Quicken Health got some publicity. As did a service I’d never heard of called Smart Medical Consumer which seems to help you beat up providers and insurers who aren’t playing fair. (If you can’t get into that WSJ site, and it should be free, there’s a summary here)

Of course (plug plug) two weeks from tomorrow Revolution & Quicken are on the "Consumer Tools" panel at Health2.0: User-Generated Healthcare, and Christopher from MedBillingManager will be in the  crowd and we’ll try to remember to give him a shout-out!

HEALTH2.0: Facebook as a platform

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Unless you really haven’t been online for the past few months, you’re bound to have noticed all your contacts moving onto Facebook. No longer just for college kids, Facebook is opening up to everyone and seems to be taking off amongst professionals in a way MySpace never did. And just to prove it, we created a Health2.0 group on Facebook. Soon we’ll even add something to it!

Additionally Facebook is becoming a development platform for other applications. One example is this health quiz created by search engine Healia, that is on FaceBook. So go take the Healia Health Quiz.

HEALTH2.0: Sermo & PatientsLikeMe–getting very famous!

Both Sermo and PatientsLikeMe are getting increasingly famous. Ben Heywood from PatientsLikeMe was featured in Business2.0 last month, and Sermo was featured in the WSJ last week, in a column about Social Networking Goes Professional

You can also see both Sermo’s Daniel Palestrant and Ben Heywood in this short video from Business 2.0

And of course you can see both of them and many, many more at the Health2.0 Conference on September 20th. Sermo’s actually buying the drinks sponsoring the post-conference cocktails. Meanwhile, you might want to check out the incredible movie So Much So Fast about Ben’s brother—who inspired the idea of PaientsLikeMe and whole lot more.

And yes, they were on THCB last year and in this article I wrote for Digital Healthcare & Productivity in February. So we’re still ahead of the MSM here…just!

 

BEST OF: Interview with Shawn Jenkins, CEO BenefitFocus

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When I was contacted by the PR folks representing BenefitFocus I found out that they’d quietly put into place the original 1995 business plan of Healtheon–connecting employers and health plans electronically around enrollment and billing. (Remember The New New Thing?) Ironically enough some of the plans that announced that Healtheon was going to do that with them in 1996 are just getting online with BenefitFocus now! So I thought that it would be pretty interesting to talk with Shawn Jenkins, BenefitFocus’ CEO about their core business, which has been growing like crazy in the last couple of years.

Then I found out that they were also launching a Web2.0 media group including a new health care YouTube-type video site called ICYou (get it?), hiring a star local news anchor from Charleston SC, Nina Sossaman-Pogue, and creating a PHR, and that they also wanted to come sponsor and video the Health2.0 Conference. So then I really wanted to talk with Shawn!

Here’s the interview. (We had a slight technical hitch in the middle but I think my editing skills have overcome it!).

assetto corsa mods