The Health Care Blog – Page 451 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Why We’re Getting Patient Engagement Backwards

Dec 4, 2014• 14

JOE SMITH, MD

There’s a mantra in healthcare right now to “drive patient engagement.” The idea is that informed and engaged patients play a crucial role in improving the quality of care our health system delivers. With the right information, these healthcare consumers will be more active participants in their care, select providers based on quality and value metrics, demand appropriate, high-quality, high-value services and choose treatment options wisely after a thorough process of shared decision-making.

This drive for patient engagement often fails to recognize one important truth: Our healthcare system inadvertently, yet potently, discourages engagement. It ignores the fact that the patient is already the most engaged person in healthcare. The patient bears the disease, the pain, the scar – and, ultimately, the bill. In our search for greater engagement, we must realize what the comic strip Pogo said years ago – “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

53 Is the New 38

Dec 3, 2014• 3

MIKE TURPIN

Middle Age is where your broad mind and your narrow waist begin to change places.” – John Crossman

I never really took a regular medication for a condition before I was in my forties. My mother did not believe in pills. She was one part Christian Scientist and two parts Inuit Darwinist subscribing to the notion that sick children, like old people, should be just set outside the igloo at night and if they were still alive in the morning, they were allowed to rejoin the family. Illness and chronic conditions were things that plagued other people, like old man Norton who lived across the street. At 85, he suffered from heart failure and diabetes and it seemed like every other week they were lopping off one of his appendages as a sort of burnt offering to his disease. It was a preview of a movie I hoped to never see.

As a kid, you averted your eyes from the vagaries of aging, not so much out of denial but out of some misguided sense that old age only happened to other people. Deep down, you knew it would be waiting for you, like that German Shepherd that sometimes chased you on your bike. On sunny afternoons, I occasionally glimpsed Mr. Norton and he would wave to me from his wheel chair – all two arms, one foot and a half leg. It freaked me out and I made a pact that I would never succumb to old age.

Secrets to Choosing the Right Medical School

Dec 3, 2014• 5

RICHARD GUNDERMAN, MD

The competition to get into medical school is fierce. The Association of American Medical Colleges just announced that this year, nearly 50,000 students applied for just over 20,000 positions at the nation’s 141 MD-granting schools – a record. But medical schools do not have a monopoly on selectivity. The average student applies to approximately 15 schools, and many are accepted by more than one. Students attempting to sort out where to apply and which admission offer to accept face a big challenge, and they often look for guidance to medical school rankings.

Among the organizations that rank medical schools, perhaps the best-known is US News and World Report (USNWR). It ranks the nation’s most prestigious schools using the assessments of deans and chairs (20%), assessments by residency program directors (20%), research activity (grant dollars received, 30%), student selectivity (difficulty of gaining admission, 20%), and faculty resources (10%). Based on these methods, the top three schools are Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins.

Rankings seem important, but do they tell applicants what they really need to know? I recently sat down with a group of a dozen fourth-year medical students who represent a broad range of undergraduate backgrounds and medical specialty interests. I posed this question: How important are medical school rankings, and are there any other factors you wish you had paid more attention to when you chose which school to attend?

Marketplace: Digital Health Maven Growth Salon NYC

Dec 3, 2014• 2

In MARKETPLACE

Have You Ever Attended a Digital Health Event Specially Designed to Meet YOUR Needs? Now You Can

On December 12, attend an intimate New York City event designed to focus on your unique strategic, business, relationship and knowledge needs in digital health.

The event is organized around a unique system that health executives and medical professionals from around the world are using to boost their knowledge, skills and confidence in digital health.

Health Data Outside the Doctor’s Office

Dec 2, 2014• 66

DeSALVO, WHITE and PAINTER

Health primarily happens outside the doctor’s office—playing out in the arenas where we live, learn, work and play. In fact, a minority of our overall health is the result of the health care we receive. If we’re to have an accurate picture of health, we need more than what is currently captured in the electronic health record.

That’s why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) asked the distinguished JASON group to bring its considerable analytical power to bear on this problem: how to create a health information system that focuses on the health of individuals, not just the care they receive. JASON is an independent group of scientists and academics that has been advising the Federal government on matters of science and technology for over 50 years.

Why is it important to pursue this ambitious goal? There has been an explosion of data that could help with all kinds of decisions about health. Right now, though, we do not have the capability to capture and share that data with those who make decisions that impact health—including individuals, health care providers and communities.

The new report, called Data for Individual Health, builds upon the 2013 JASON report, A Robust Health Data Infrastructure. It lays out recommendations for an infrastructure that could not only achieve interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs), but could also integrate data from all walks of life—including data from personal health devices, patient collaborative networks, social media, environmental and demographic data and genomic and other “omics” data.

HIT Newser: Alarm Issues Top Health Hazard List

Dec 1, 2014

MICHELLE RONAN NOTEBOOM

CMS Gives Hospitals One Month Attestation Reprieve

CMS extends the deadline for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals to attest for MU from November 30 to December 31, giving hospitals more time to submit MU data for the 2014 program year in order to receive payments under EHR incentive programs. CMS also pushed back the deadline for hospitals to electronically submit clinical quality measures to December 31.

VA Issues RFP for New Scheduling System

The VA issues an RFP to replace its 30 year-old appointment scheduling system with a commercially available solution to integrate with its existing VistA platform. The proposal deadline is January 9 and potential bidders will not be required to have prior experience working with the agency.

CareTech Solutions Negotiating Sale to HTC Global Services

HIT service provider CareTech Solutions files an “intent to sell” to HTC Global Services, a provider of IT services for multiple industries.Continue reading…

Healthcare.gov? Go to the Back of the Line!!!

Dec 1, 2014• 4

ACA DATABASE

Aardvark in North Carolina writes:

On the Healthcare.gov web site I was filling the application – an arduous process that – even when pre-filled from last year, takes 30 – 45 minutes. At the review and sign, I found ONE date that was wrong: the day and month were inadvertently transposed. from 09/08 to 08/09. Since the information will be checked against tax records I thought it best to correct this prior to signing.

I clicked on the “edit” button which brought a box “Do you really want to edit your application”, Yes! That’s why I clicked the button – BOOM! back to “GO”,

So it took almost 45 minutes to go through again, (I do work by the way, so this time consuming process is not OK), but I did it. THEN at review I found I had been so frustrated OR the process accepted the key stroke wrong so I now had 09/03 instead of 09/08.

NOT wanting to go back to the very beginning AGAIN, I called the help desk, thinking this would save time. The agent was supportive and pleasant, but basically REFILLED the ENTIRE form again!!!!!!!

We Don’t Have to Live This Way!

Dec 1, 2014• 23

MICHAEL PAINTER, MD

You got me. I still won’t cop to eating at a Cheesecake Factory, but I am all about the Apple Store. In fact, I’m a teensy bit over the top about it. Seriously, I beg of you—could we, please, have just a little genius bar with our health care?

I’m no doubt somewhat of a freak (I got up at 2:55 a.m. ET on September 19th to, you know, pre-order the iPhone 6). A month or so later, I was more than ready to upgrade my aging iPad2, so obviously at the first opportunity I ordered a new iPad Air 2 online from the Apple website. I requested pick-up at my local Apple Store—because it’s convenient—and, well, I just love going there. A few minutes after I made my online purchase, I received an email informing me that the store staff was ready for me. My new baby was waiting! Serious goose bumps.

I made my way to the mall. It was pretty crowded, as usual. I walked right past The Cheesecake Factory, into the mall, turned left and into the gleaming Apple Store—smiling, not quite skipping, all along. Several staff members greeted me almost the minute I arrived. I explained why I was there. When she understood my reason for coming to the store, the first staff person handed me off to another. I showed him the email on my iPhone. We traded some numbers. He entered those on his iPhone and went back to get my waiting . . . Air 2!!

Blog-a-palooza!

Nov 30, 2014• 3

THCBist

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Wellness Puts CEOs on a Collision Course with Obamacare and Common Sense

Nov 29, 2014• 40

AL LEWIS and VIK KHANNA

By now readers of this and many other outlets know that conventional workplace wellness doesn’t work. Period. It’s not that there is no evidence for it. It’s far more compelling: all the evidence is against it. The so-called “evidence” in favor of it is easily disproven as being the result of gross incompetence and/or dishonesty. And occasionally, as in the American Journal of Health Promotion, investigators in this field manage to disprove their own savings claims without intending to, “face invalidity” as it might be termed. This is not an isolated event: analytic self-immolation happens so often that Surviving Workplace Wellness even has a line about it: “In wellness, you don’t have to challenge the data to invalidate it. You merely have to read the data. It will invalidate itself.”

Just before Thanksgiving, both Health Affairs (with our blog post which, given the events we are about to describe, seems almost prescient) and the often-misquoted author of multiple RAND studies (in a comment to that post) weighed in with the same conclusion, as described in the headline: “Workplace Wellness Produces No Savings.”

The article, Health Affairs most widely read posting of November and one of the most widely read of the year, was described to me as the wellness equivalent of the 1912 Armory Show, as being the seminal event that immediately changed the field forever. No longer could anyone claim with a straight face that “pry, poke, prod and punish” wellness programs saved money, or were even beneficial for employee health.

And yet…

Within one business day of this posting, Reuters’ Sharon Begley reports that on Tuesday, December 2, the Business Roundtable’s (BRT’s) CEO is having a sit-down meeting with President Obama to demand exactly the opposite of what all the evidence shows: more flexibility and less enforcement to do wellness as the ACA empowers them to. In particular, they want the Administration to call off the EEOC watchdogs, who have recently attacked Honeywell and others for forcing its employees into medical exams that appear to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The BRT’s goal is to allow companies to punish unhealthy workers to the limits of the Affordable Care Act’s wellness provision. (Recall from our earlier postings that the ACA wellness provision itself was modeled after the Safeway wellness program, which Safeway later admitted did not even exist during the period for which the company claim it saved money.) In essence, the BRT leadership wants to make their employees love wellness whether they like it or not.