The Health Care Blog – Page 280 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

A Four Step Plan For the Value-Based Transformation of the Health Care System

Mar 9, 2018• 14

By ALEX AZAR

HHS Secretary Alex Azar spoke earlier this week at the American Federation of Hospitals, giving a widely reported speech that offered new details on the Trump administration’s plans for Accountable Care Organizations, the CMS quality measurement program, and a new drive for patient access to medical records. The full text of his remarks follows. – The Editors.

It’s a pleasure to be here with all of you today. I want to thank Chip [Kahn] and all of the Federation’s members for inviting me to share our vision for HHS and America’s healthcare system, and how we hope to work with all of you to make it a reality.

One of the key commitments President Trump has made across this administration has been to see the private sector as our partners, not as just entities to be regulated or overseen.

That charge has been taken seriously at HHS from Day One. We at HHS see stakeholders, including our nation’s hospitals, as part of the solution to our country’s many healthcare challenges. We recognize that it’s not just government that wants better healthcare for all Americans. Our partners in the private sector, all of you, want the same.

It’s an exciting time to take over the helm as Secretary of HHS, full of both challenges and opportunities. The same goes for our stakeholders, as advances in science are transforming medicine. It seems like it’s every other week that FDA is approving some novel therapy, or NIH announces a finding that revolutionizes how we think about a key piece of biology.

But innovation in payment and delivery systems is simply not proceeding at the same pace. When I was at HHS in the 2000s, concepts like personalized medicine and cell therapies for cancer were in their infancy. Now, personalized medicine has come to life, and cell therapies are receiving FDA approval.

Meanwhile, on the delivery side, back in the 2000s, shifting to a value-based system was just getting going as well. And yet here we are today — more than a decade later — and value-based payment is still far from reaching its potential.

Health in 2 point 00, Episode 7

Mar 8, 2018

More from HIMSS18, it’s episode 7 in which I get to give a shout out to UPMC, OneView HealthCare, Echo Ventures, & GE Ventures who funded patient travel to HIMSS via the Society for Participatory Medicine. And to HIMSS itself which for the first time let patients in for free. Jessica DaMassa asking the questions and thanks to @HealthTechDan from Digital Health Today for running the camera–Matthew Holt

The Trump Administration, Patient Data Rights + Value Based Care

Mar 8, 2018• 15

By SEEMA VERMA

Following is the full text of CMS administrator Seema Verma’s remarks at HIMSS18 in Las Vegas.

It is a privilege to be with you here today and speak about the amazing advancements happening all across the nation in healthcare. One of the most exciting parts about being the CMS Administrator is the opportunity to see the cutting-edge breakthroughs that are happening every day. As we walk the exhibit hall of this conference, it is easy to be struck by how innovation is accelerating in healthcare.

We have procedures that we couldn’t have imagined a generation ago that are saving thousands of lives.

Precision medicine has opened the door to a new world of therapies specifically tailored to a patient’s unique genetic code.
We can now treat retinal disease that causes blindness.
Robotic technology is making surgeries less invasive, and we are on the verge of having the world’s first artificial pancreas.
3D training tools are enabling doctors to learn anatomy without a cadaver.
Telemedicine is also improving access to care and empowering CMS beneficiaries to lead healthier lives.

And it doesn’t stop with traditional healthcare innovators. The automobile industry is partnering with leading technology companies to perfect driverless cars that may one day give independence to our nation’s elderly and people with disabilities. And through smart phones and wear-able technology, we are compiling health information every second, and Americans are using that information to track activity, calories, and heart rates. Innovators are even developing ways to monitor chronic illness with electronic watches. The list of innovation is endless.

But while all of this technology is changing every area of our lives, we face enormous challenges in healthcare, and the value that we are receiving for the amount of money that is being spent.

Last year CMS released a report showing that the rate of growth in healthcare spending is not slowing down. Despite all of the changes and regulations over the past decade, healthcare continues to grow more quickly than the overall economy. By 2026, we will be spending one in every five dollars on healthcare.

Health in 2 point 00, Episode 6

Mar 7, 2018

This edition of Health in 2 point 00 comes from HIMSS. This one was done just off the show floor, but don’t worry–tomorrow we’ll be back to doing it outside a bar! So here goes! Jessica DaMassa asks me as many questions as she can squeeze in about health & technology in just 2 minutes–Matthew Holt

What to Decide When You’re Expecting

Mar 7, 2018• 5

By ERIN LANDAU and REENA AGGARWAL, MD

Selecting an obstetrician or midwife and birth center or hospital is arguably one of the most important decisions that a pregnant woman makes. This choice will determine many aspects of a woman’s pregnancy journey, including the likelihood that she delivers via C-section. To understand how women choose their obstetric provider and their delivery facility, Ovia Health has teamed up with Ariadne Labs to survey women and help shed light on this important decision-making process.

C-sections in America

Few would debate that the United States is experiencing a C-section epidemic. One out of every three babies is born via C-section, despite the fact that 1) research shows that most pregnant women prefer and plan for vaginal delivery and 2) the World Health Organization (WHO) has argued that 10-15% is the optimal cesarean rate, placing the US at double or even triple the optimal rate. As the most common major surgery performed in the United States, C-sections are responsible for 20,000 surgical complications and infections annually, and account for over $5 billion in excess medical spend each year. Although C-sections can be life saving interventions, they still pose significant risks to both mother and child. C-section rates have risen at alarming rates across the United States, and many people, both inside and outside the medical community, are dedicated to uncovering and reversing the root cause of this trend.

Deadline This Week For Your Special Rate For Health 2.0 Annual Conference

Mar 6, 2018• 2

SPONSORED POST

By HEALTH 2.0

Deadline This Friday To Grab The Lowest Price For The Health 2.0 Annual Fall Conference!

Secure your $999 rate today for the 12th Annual Fall Conference before the price increases this weekend.

We want you to experience the incredible speakers, penetrating discussions, ample networking with industry leaders, and the new technological platforms that will impact the market…at the Health 2.0 Fall Conference.

This is your last chance to have the opportunity to come with our lowest rate. Register here!

With the special rate pass, you will:

Network with the right decision makers to grow your business: Rub shoulders with investors, partners, and innovators who will transform your business and expand your market reach through Health 2.0 programs including MarketConnect – connecting leading health care organizations with the most promising vetted technology companies to accelerate the health tech buying process.

Participate in our action-packed agenda: Join panel sessions on policy, innovation and technology including 3 CEOs, Launch, The Unacceptables, and Interoperability.

Experience new technological platforms: Watch over 150 live health tech demos from the newest innovative companies to gain insight to what’s new in the market.

Whether you’re looking for the next new innovation or to network with the most influential health care providers, developers, and start-ups; the 12th Annual Fall Conference is the place to be this fall!

Grab your special rate of $999 today before it expires this weekend.

Myth No. 1: Quality of Care in the U.S. Health System is the Best in the World

Mar 6, 2018• 8

By PAUL KECKLEY

According to Gallup surveys, four of five Americans believe the quality of care they receive is good or excellent, and the majority think it is the best available in the world. Surveys by Roper, Harris Interactive, Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health, and others show similar findings. And the public’s view hasn’t changed in two decades despite an avalanche of report cards about its performance, a testy national debate about health reform and persistent media attention to its shortcomings and errors. But is the public’s confidence in the quality of the care we provide based on an informed view or something else? It’s an important distinction.

Two considerations are useful for context:

Measuring quality of care objectively in the U.S. system is a relatively new focus. And we’re learning we’re not as good as they think we are. Historically, the public’s view about “quality of care” has been anchored in two strong beliefs: 1-the U.S. system has the latest technologies and drugs, the world’s best trained clinicians and most modern facilities, so it must be the best and 2-the care “I receive” from my physicians and caregivers is excellent because they’re all well-trained and smart.

Health in 2 point 00 — Late night HIMSS18 edition

Mar 6, 2018

For reasons a little lost in the fog we have committed to doing an episode of Health in 2 Point 00 every day at HIMSS. As I didn’t meet my co-host Jessica DaMassa till late it was more like “Health in 22.00”. But we still covered a few topics (Google Cloud, Eric Schmidt, Pilots) from our none too private studio in the corridor at the Venetian!–Matthew Holt

AI Is Close to Giving Us the Ultimate Early Diagnostic Test For Breast Cancer

Mar 5, 2018• 1

By HUGH HARVEY, MD

1986 was a great year. In the heyday of the worst-dressed decade in history, the Russians launched the Mir Space Station, Pixar was founded, Microsoft went public, the first 3D printer was sold, and Matt Groening created The Simpsons. Meanwhile, two equally important but entirely different scientific leaps occurred in completely separate academic fields on opposite sides of the planet. Now, thirty two years later, the birth of deep learning and the first implementation of breast screening are finally converging to create what could be the ultimate early diagnostic test for the most common cancer in women.

A brief history of deep learning

1986: In America, a small group of perceived agitators in the early field of machine learning published a paper in Nature entitled “Learning representations by back-propagating errors”. The authors, Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams had gone against the grain of conventional wisdom and proved that by re-running a neural network’s output errors backwards through a system, they could dramatically improve performance at image perception tasks. Back-propagation (or back-prop for short) wasn’t their discovery (for we all stand on the shoulders of giants) but with the publishing of this paper they managed to finally convince the sceptical machine learning community that using hand-engineering features to ‘teach’ a computer what to look for was not the way forward. Both the massive efficiency gains of the technique, and the fact that painstaking feature engineering by subject matter experts was no longer required to discover underlying patterns in data, meant that back-propagation allowed artificial neural networks to be applied to a vastly greater array of problems that was previously possible. For many, 1986 marks the year that deep learning as we know it was born.

Health in 2 point 00 Episode 4, HIMSS18 kickoff special

Mar 5, 2018

In which Jessica DaMassa asks me questions about Uber, Apple, Verily, Eric Schmidt, Oliver Wyman and UPMC’s profits. All in 2 minutes in this HIMSS18 special edition. Watch out! As we are going to try to do this every day this week from HIMSS, if my stamina and liver cooperate. Thanks to UPMC, OneView HealthCare, Echo Ventures and GE Ventures for supporting patient and caregivers travel to HIMSS18–Matthew Holt