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Above the Fold

Seven Reasons Why Your Doctor Is Still Using Technology That Sucks

Feb 24, 2014• 8

By Charlene Ngamwajasat

Did you ever walk into a doctor’s office and then have to fill out a long paper intake form with the same information you’ve filled out multiple times before (name, date of birth, insurance etc)? Or notice that your doctor is writing notes on pieces of paper that remind you of your days in school? Did you ever see someone carry a pager around? Was that person wearing a white coat?

You can bank and pay for your Etsy/Amazon/Target/Apple “gotta have that now” stuff online. You can Skype with your family who lives thousands of miles away. You can order a pizza & know the exact moment it comes out of the oven. You can interact with @Oreo, @TacoBell @Grumpycat online.

So why can’t you easily see your health charges online? Why can’t you get a quick text or email that you’ll be seen by your doctor in 10 minutes? Why can’t you Skype with your doctor?

1. Until recently, your doctor has probably had little to no training or exposure to the world of digital health.

If you do a quick and dirty poll and ask the MD’s in your life what it is, you’ll likely get a ?-mark look or an answer related to apps, electronic medical records, or meaningful use. How can that be? Don’t most doctors have smartphones & tablets? Yes, a lot do but their use in a professional capacity isn’t 100% yet.

Until recently, there were no courses in med school or noon lectures in residency related to health information technology, wearables, personalized medicine, medical apps etc

It’s hard to use something or integrate it into your daily life if you’ve never heard of or really used it before.Continue reading…

CVS Caremark Enters CommonWell

Feb 24, 2014• 4

By John H. Hammergren

One of the most critical issues facing our healthcare system is the fact that the IT systems we’ve put in place have not yet led to a more connected, intelligent approach to patient care.

While we have made notable headway toward interoperability through health information exchange solutions, we must dramatically accelerate our progress to support the transition to value-based care and realize our full potential as an industry.

With this vision in mind, McKesson, Cerner and other leading healthcare IT companies announced the CommonWell Health Alliance last year at HIMSS13. Members of the Alliance are united by a shared commitment to develop a core set of interoperability services and standards that will enable patient data to be shared securely across care settings and electronic health record (EHR) platforms.

In the twelve months since, tremendous progress has been made in making this aspiration a reality. CommonWell is running robust initial projects and collaborating with a myriad of practices. We’re also continuing to expand with new members who share our ideal of the trusted exchange of patient data, regardless of vendor, system, or setting.

Now, the Alliance is welcoming its first pharmacy member in CVS Caremark. This is a watershed event for several reasons.

CVS Caremark is one of the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains and pharmacy benefit management companies. Few organizations in any segment of healthcare have more access to patient data and more trusted influence.

But CVS Caremark’s role in driving innovation in our healthcare system, and its importance to the goal of interoperability, is vital for other reasons.

Are Payors Changing What They Pay For Medical Billing Codes To Adjust For Supply and Demand?

Feb 24, 2014• 8

By THCBist

Startup Mojo from Rhode Island writes:

Hey there, maybe THCB readers can weigh in on this one. I work at a healthcare startup. Somebody I know who works in medical billing told me that several big name insurers they know of are using analytics to adjust reimbursement rates for medical billing codes on an almost daily and even hourly basis (a bit like the travel sites and airlines do to adjust for supply and demand) and encourage/discourage certain codes. If that’s true, its certainly fascinating and pretty predictable, I guess.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. It sounds draconian. On the other hand, it also sounds cool. Everybody else is doing the same sort of stuff with analytics: why not insurers? Information on this practice would obviously be useful for providers submitting claims, who might theoretically be able to game the system by timing when and how they submit. Is there any data out there on this?

Is this b.s. or not?

Lost in the health care maze? Having trouble with your health Insurance? Confused about your treatment options? Email your questions to THCB’s editors. We’ll run the good ones as posts.

Can Oscar Succeed In Making Health Insurance Fun? Maybe Not Just Yet. But the Startup Is Shaking Things Up …

Feb 24, 2014• 3

By Kate Greenwood

Last week I went to a panel presentation sponsored by the group NYC Health Business Leaders on the rollout of New York State’s health insurance exchange. Among the speakers was Mario Schlosser, the co-founder and co-CEO of the venture-capital-backed start-up health insurance company Oscar Health, which offers a full range of plans through New York’s exchange.

As NPR reported last month in a story about Oscar, “it’s been years since a new, for-profit health insurance company launched in the U.S.”, but the Affordable Care Act created a window of opportunity for new entrants.

Schlosser began his talk by giving us a tour of his personal account on Oscar’s website, www.hioscar.com. Among other things, he showed us the Facebook-like timeline, updated in real time, which tracks his two young children’s many visits to the pediatrician.

He typed “my tummy hurts” into the site’s search engine and the site provided information on what might be wrong and on where he might turn for help, ranging from a pharmacist to a gastroenterologist, with cost estimates for each option.

Additional searches yielded information on covered podiatrists accepting new patients with offices near his apartment and on the out-of-pocket cost of a prescription for diazepam (which was zero, since there is no co-payment for generic drugs for Oscar enrollees).

As an audience member noted, none of this is new exactly. What is new is to have this kind of data-driven, state-of-the-art user experience being offered by a health insurer. Schlosser told the audience that Oscar’s pharmacy benefit manager and other vendors are providing the company with real-time data that other insurers have not demanded.

Box & Dignity Health Name Five Semi-Finalists in Patient Education App Challenge

Feb 24, 2014

By Kim Krueger

Back at the Seventh Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference in September, Box launched a Patient Education App Challenge with Dignity Health and The Social+Capital Partnership.

It was an appropriate launch pad to say the least, being like-minded as we are when it comes to our opinions regarding the cloud. Yet, as we know, health care is still relatively new to the cloud, and the entry of major cloud (and now HIPAA compliant) vendors like Box is a big deal.

Phase one of Box’s entry into the health care vertical has been largely centered on getting a diverse client base securely onto the cloud. Device companies, big pharma, life sciences, biotech, and health insurance companies are using Box just as cloud tools should be used — for storing, sharing, collaborating, and enabling mobility.

As most of us know from varied personal and professional use of the cloud, easy access to every piece of collateral in a remote or collaborative working environment increases velocity and enables relationships.

The Patient Education App Challenge is part of Box’s move into a phase two of sorts: “strategic data liquidity or care coordination in the cloud” as Box’s Managing Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences Missy Krasner called it.

The challenge developed out of talks between Dignity Health, the nation’s fifth largest hospital system, and Box around how hospitals can better deliver the huge amounts of content generated within any given hospital division. It launched with the Box API as a foundation for innovative opportunities to deliver appropriate materials to patients in engaging ways.

What You Need to Know About Patient Matching and Your Privacy and What You Can Do About It

Feb 21, 2014• 4

By Adrian Gropper, MD

Today, ONC released a report on patient matching practices and to the casual reader it will look like a byzantine subject. It’s not.

You should care about patient matching, and you will.

It impacts your ability to coordinate care, purchase life and disability insurance, and maybe even your job. Through ID theft, it also impacts your safety and security. Patient matching’s most significant impact, however, could be to your pocketbook as it’s being used to fix prices and reduce competition in a high deductible insurance system that makes families subject up to $12,700 of out-of-pocket expenses every year.

Patient matching is the healthcare cousin of NSA surveillance.

Health IT’s watershed is when people finally realize that hospital privacy and security practices are unfair and we begin to demand consent, data minimization and transparency for our most intimate information. The practices suggested by Patient Privacy Rights are relatively simple and obvious and will be discussed toward the end of this article.

Health IT tries to be different from other IT sectors. There are many reasons for this, few of them are good reasons. Health IT practices are dictated by HIPAA, where the rest of IT is either FTC or the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Healthcare is mostly paid by third-party insurance and so the risks of fraud are different than in traditional markets.

Healthcare is delivered by strictly licensed professionals regulated differently than the institutions that purchase the Health IT. These are the major reasons for healthcare IT exceptionalism but they are not a good excuse for bad privacy and security practices, so this is about to change.

Health IT privacy and security are in tatters, and nowhere is it more evident than the “patient matching” discussion. Although HIPAA has some significant security features, it also eliminated a patient’s right to consent and Fair Information Practice.

In Defense of Corporate Wellness Programs

Feb 21, 2014• 37

By RAJIV KUMAR, MD

A recent blog on HBR.org proposed to deliver “The Cure for the Common Corporate Wellness Program.” But as with any prescription, you really shouldn’t swallow this one unless all your questions about it have been answered. As a physician, a patient, and a businessman, I see plenty to question in Al Lewis and Vik Khanna’s critique of workplace wellness initiatives.

With their opening generalization that “many wellness programs” are deeply flawed, the authors dismiss a benefit enjoyed by a healthy majority of America’s workers. Today, nearly 80% of people who work for organizations with 50 or more employees have access to a wellness program, according to a 2013 RAND study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

It’s not clear whether the authors are intentionally dismissing or simply misunderstanding the wealth of data that shows how wellness programs benefit participating employees. The RAND study summarizes it this way: “Consistent with prior research, we find that lifestyle management interventions as part of workplace wellness programs can reduce risk factors, such as smoking, and increase healthy behaviors, such as exercise. We find that these effects are sustainable over time and clinically meaningful.”

Lewis and Khanna, however, don’t focus on such findings. Instead, they question the motives of a company for even offering a wellness program, which they slam as an “employee control tool” and “a marketing tool for health plans.” And, in perhaps the most baffling statement of all, the authors suggest that workplace wellness initiatives are “trying to manipulate health behaviors that are largely unrelated to enterprise success” (emphasis mine).

Let’s consider that piece by piece. What are the behaviors that corporate wellness initiatives are trying to influence? According to the RAND study, the most common offerings — available in roughly 75% of all wellness initiatives — are on-site vaccinations and “lifestyle management” programs for smoking cessation, weight loss, good nutrition, and fitness. In short, companies want to reduce the risk that their workers will get the flu, develop lung cancer, or suffer from the many debilitating conditions linked to overweight and a sedentary lifestyle. How could these initiatives be deemed “largely unrelated” to the company’s success?

Do Workplace Wellness Programs Make Business Sense?

Feb 21, 2014• 6

By Soeren Mattke

The press and trade publications strongly endorse workplace wellness programs as a good investment for employers. Soeren Mattke, a physician and RAND senior scientist, explains why his work tells a different story.

Why are workplace wellness programs so popular?

Because employers think the programs make business sense. They are supposed to improve employees’ health, increase their productivity, help control their chronic conditions, and reduce their risk of developing a chronic disease in the longer term. Employers believe that the dollars they spend on these programs will come back to them in avoided health care costs. For example, a recently published review suggested that employers gained three dollars in health care savings for every dollar spent on a workplace wellness program.

What does a typical workplace wellness program look like?

They usually have two components: lifestyle management and disease management. Lifestyle management focuses on employees with health risks such as smoking or obesity. The goal is to help employees reduce those risks, thus steering clear of serious disease down the line. In contrast, disease management is intended to support employees who already have a chronic disease by helping them take better care of themselves, e.g., reminding them to take their medications.

So are the programs living up to their press?

Perhaps in part. We recently published a study that included almost 600,000 employees at seven firms. We found that lifestyle management reduced health risk, like smoking and obesity, but no evidence that it lowered employers’ health care spending. Our new analysis extends that finding. Looking at 10 years worth of data from a Fortune 100 employer, we found that its program generated a reduction of about $30 per member, per month in health care costs. But disease management was responsible for 87 percent of the savings.

How does this disparity translate into return on employer’s investment?

The return on investment is strikingly different. For the disease management component, the employer earned a $3.80 return for every dollar invested in the program. For lifestyle management, the return was only $.25 for every dollar invested.

Bigger Hospitals Mean Bigger Hospitals with Higher Prices. Not Better Care.

Feb 20, 2014• 52

By Shannon Brownlee & Vikas Saini, MD

Hospitals are busily merging with other hospitals and buying up groups of doctors. They claim that size brings efficiency and the opportunity to deliver more “value-based” care — and fewer unnecessary services.

They argue that they have to get bigger to cut waste. What’s the evidence that bigger hospitals offer better value? Not a lot.

If you think of value as some combination of needed services delivered for the right price, large hospitals are no better than small hospitals on both counts.

The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care and other sources have shown time and again that some of the biggest and best-known U.S. hospitals are no less guilty of subjecting patients to useless tests and marginal treatments.

Larger hospitals are also very good at raising prices. In 2010, an analysis for the Massachusetts attorney general found no correlation between price and quality of care.

A study published recently in Health Affairs offered similar results for the rest of the country: On average, higher-priced hospitals are bigger, but offer no better quality of care.

I’m a Doctor. And This Stuff Even Confuses Me!!!

Feb 20, 2014• 29

By THCBist

Extremely irate on the East Coast writes:

I’m a doctor. I have an MBA from a prestigious business school. I understand medical billing. Here’s a story for you that sums it all up.

After many years as an independent, my OBGYN recently joined a large physician group affiliated with a nationally known academic medical center.

(I’ll keep the name of the institution out of this since I like my OBGYN and several of my friends work at the medical center.)

Late last year I had a minor procedure at the academic medical center. My OBGYN handled the surgery. Everything went smoothly.

When the bill came I was charged a reasonable $600. This year I had to have a repeat of the same procedure. My OBGYN again performed the procedure. Same outcome. Same nurses. Same specialist. Same room. When my bill came in the mail I got the shock of my life. The total was four times as much as it had been a year earlier!!!! I had no idea.

My OBGYN’s office told me there is nothing they can do. Prices are set by the new academic medical center supergroup. As far as I can tell, the only thing that has changed is the sign over my doctor’s door.

What recourse do I have? What consumer protections does the ACA contain designed to prevent this kind of behavior?

I’m a doctor. I understand the issues involved. If I’m confused, how is the average consumer supposed to deal with this? This is extremely bad.

Lost in the health care maze? Having trouble with your health Insurance? Confused about your treatment options? Email your questions to THCB’s editors. We’ll run the good ones as posts.