See you next week when I’ll be the official bloggist at the WHCC Conference
Meanwhile, congrats to John who actually runs this blog, and became a Daddy to Lilly on Tuesday!
Above the Fold
BLOGS: And on the subject of blog collaboration
Steve Beller, over on his Curing Healthcare blog, has a proposal for linking blogs with a Wiki. He wants to convert all the great stuff being generated in blogs and other sources all over the web into an encyclopedia of content about the system. Go take a look a his proposal for A Healthcare Wikipedia Linking with Community of Healthcare Blogs.
BLOGS: Report on health care blogs
Fard Johnmar has written a report on health care blogs. It’s available from his site for around $37, rather less than the $3,000 analysis Datamonitor was offering on the same topic a few weeks back. Despite the fact that my ego is still recovering from the act that in over 100 pages he only mentions THCB twice, I thought I’d let him tell you about it! Here’s Fard:
"One of the reasons that I wrote this report was to acknowledge the hard work of the bloggers who take the time everyday to collect, analyze and debate the politics, practice and social aspects of healthcare. It’s not easy, and everyone in the healthcare blogosphere deserves tremendous respect. Another reason I developed this report was to provide those of you out there looking for ways to explain the value of blogs to your colleagues, employers and others with cogent and well-referenced arguments for why blogs are a useful and powerful communications medium. However, I believe that blogs are not right for every organization, so I provide reasons not to start one. So, pick up a report, if you feel you will gain from it. Whatever you decide, lets continue having this conversation about how blogs can benefit healthcare."
POLICY/PHYSICIANS: Mother of all comment threads
If you haven’t been reading, there are now some 46 long detailed and excellent comments in the article called Can the real HSA fan, please stand, please stand up?.
Speaking as someone who’s been through the academic mill, this comment thread provides about a semester and more’s worth of education on the entire topic of health management and health policy. Note Steve Beller’s excellent summary of the conversation so far at around comment #30!
Fantastic work—my hat is off to all the commenters
Spot-On: Matthew Holt: A Tale of Two Underwriters
My latest—and hopefully last—explanation of my weird trip through the individual insurance market is up over at Spot-on. I’m channeling a certain boring English 19th century author in a A Tale of Two Underwriters.
As ever please come back here to comment if you like.
POLICY/PHARMA/POLITICS: Losing it with the WaPo
It’s interesting tracking intellectual BS. The latest one is all the surveys selecting only people who have signed up with Part D and then reporting their experience, without mentioning that they’re likely to be happy because it’s a self selected group! And of course not surveying those who didn’t sign up about their experience. Over at TPMCafe I explain why the Washington Post continues to look like a bunch of idiots for using the Administration’s data, and—worse—for commissioning a survey continuing the lie!
POLICY/PHYSICIANS: Full disclosure, well not really
There’s been a lot of debate about transparency on THCB. I believe in as full disclosure as possible about all kinds of medical data, including pay rates, utilization rates, quality indicators, etc, etc. But I also count myself among the enlightened few who realize that the individual piece-rate service level is not the place at which consumers are best qualified to make comparison judgments about the value of their care. I liken it to the computer purchaser at a corporation—sure you want to know the individual prices of the computers you buy, but what’s really important is the total cost of ownership divided by the benefit you get from them. Or take a motoring analogy, as Glen Tullman CEO of Allscripts does over at HHN on a different topic—you want to know the total cost per year for purchase, insurance, gas, repair, etc, etc for your car. You don’t care in great detail how much your mechanic charges you for an individual spark plug so that you can go to Pep boys and buy one cheaper. Instead you want to know the rough overall cost between a Yugo versus a Camry versus a Jaguar, and then within each class. That’s what the managed competition model is trying to get to.
Of course transparency does help. Joe Paduda is right when he finds the Administration’s position on not releasing Medicare physician data is too, say the least, a little odd. Unlike most of their information releases these days, this one is apparently legal and makes sense for the nation. Although I understand why the Business Roundtable is for it and equally why the AMA is no doubt against it.
TECH: I’m almost becoming a journalist….
Little did I know three years ago when I started this blog, that I might venture down the path of actually becoming a journalist. Well here I am, with my own by-line on a story at Health-IT World. It’s called Location Tracking Magic and the Aircraft Black Box: Coming to a Hospital Near You
Of course, now I know what freelance journos make, I’m not exactly thinking that this is such a great career move!
Meanwhile, Shahid Shah has a pretty interesting article about RSS in the same issue.
TECH/BLOGS: One blog collaboration effort coming right up.
Over at HealthNex, the IBM health care blog; Blogposium is a Go: April 18-19. I will not be taking part in this one, because of something I’ll tell you about later. But it looks pretty interesting. Lots of different bloggers all working on different aspects of a clinical wiki.
So here’s what’s going on: Here’s Jack Mason’s guide.
The Objective: To help flesh out The Clinical
Informatics Wiki with a dozen or more new entries, so that this
wikipedia-like resource will become more useful for all. The
Work: In the next few weeks, each participating blogger will choose a
topic related to healthcare IT (I’ll take on Biobanking, for
example) research it, and prepare a first draft for an entry in the ClinfoWiki.
Entries should include basic definitions, links to supporting material, etc.
April 18: Bloggers will post their first drafts on and all
of us, as well as all our readers, will provide comments, suggests and edits on
each other’s work. Everyone should include links at the bottom of their draft to
the preliminary drafts of fellow Blogposium participants, so that we will pass
traffic and editorial eyeballs around.April 19: Readers and other Blogposium participants will
continue to provide input, and topic authors will work toward second drafts
based on comments.April 20: Blogposium participants
post their revised Second Drafts, for
inclusion in the wiki and point our collective readership to it for continuing
evolution.
POLICY: Joe Paduda on Sally Pipes
Joe Paduda is falling into the trap of looking for logic from the Canada-bashing crowd. He thinks that Sally Pipes (from the loony fringe Pacific Research Institute based incredibly enough in the people’s republic of San Francisco) is, ahem, not quite making logical statements. But I have to give him props for this one sentence commenting on Pipes’ absurd comparison of Massachusetts to General Motors.
Oh jeez, that’s about eight errors in less than one sentence.
Of course the dreadful GM health plan for its American workers is actually so terrible that GM is trying belatedly to run away from it. How are they doing that? Well they’re sending all their Michigan jobs up to Canada, because Canadian employers like their nation’s single payer health plan. I’m sure Sally Pipes knows why.
