The Health Care Blog – Page 637 – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Breaking Down the Process of Innovation: The Value of Community

May 8, 2012• 1

By Wil Yu

In just about a month, the third Annual Health Datapalooza will take place in Washington, DC – a celebration of data-driven healthcare innovation (tax-payer funded data, by the way). The part of the program that I’m personally looking forward to is the Apps Expo of about a hundred or so health apps that will be showcased throughout the event. While there will be center stage presentations by a cavalcade of inspiring leaders (including Thomas Geotz and Bob Kocher), what is noteworthy is that there will be the opportunity to participate in roundtable discussions and deep dive sessions on top-of-mind areas of development such as big data, ACOs, and consumer data liberation. (liberacion!)

But what is the value in attendance? Better question, why has the event attracted more and more new attendees recently?

I’ve spent the last few years supporting private-sector healthcare innovation – especially around health IT. What I’ve come to appreciate from those dedicated to the space – whether a two person startup or a carve-out within a large technology prime – is that success at every stage of innovative development is predicated on how quickly one can create value based on the expectations of the relevant stakeholders at that stage.

The Great Experiment

May 8, 2012• 10

By Paul Levy

If you read only one book about state and federal health care policy, it should be The Great Experiment: The States, the Feds and Your Healthcare. Published by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, it is the most articulate and rigorous presentation of issues that I have seen, a stark contrast from many papers, articles, and speeches that slide by as “informed debate” in Massachusetts and across the country. I learned more about health care policy from this book than from anything else I have read in the last decade.

While the book is constructed as a number of chapters by experts in field, it has a consistent voice and and is highly readable. There is an engaging explanation by Jennifer Heldt Powell of the politics and substance of how the Massachusetts health care reform bill came into being; and there is also a data-rich analysis by Amy Lischko and Josh Archambault of how it is working. But the book is quick to point out that what has happened in Massachusetts is unlikely to be an appropriate model for the nation.

Barking Up The Wrong Tree: Affordability, Not Cost Growth, Is The Policy Challenge

May 8, 2012• 6

By Jeff Goldsmith

A recent spate of commentaries on the continuing health spending moderation raise an important policy question: If the cost curve is well and truly bent, why are we investing so much of our policy energy on bending it further, when the more pressing problem is the declining percentage of Americans that can afford our health system’s astronomical costs?

Health spending the past two reported years (2009 and 2010) have grown in the high 3 percent range, the lowest growth rates since Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office (1960), five years before Medicare. Medicare’s actuaries have pointed to the recession as a root cause. Yet even Medicare spending growth has subsided to about 5 percent in 2010, a development hard to attribute to recession since so few Medicare patients have first-dollar cost exposure. This analyst’s extensive industry contacts suggest no spending rebound in 2011 and 2012, despite an aging population and fee-for-service’s pernicious volume-increasing incentives in full force.

Pharmaceutical spending. The two most explosive cost problems of the 1980’s and 1990’s, pharmaceutical spending and imaging — which together now represent about 20 percent of total health spending — are now seeing low single digit growth, and seem likely to remain quiescent. In the pharma case, the main contributor is the ruinous outflow of branded drugs from patent protection, and the failure to replace them with new protected drugs. This outflow continues unabated until 2018. Branded drug prescriptions are shrinking by 5 percent per year, and the only things preventing pharmaceutical sales from actually declining are brand price increases and growth in generics, which now represent almost 80 percent of prescriptions, according to IMS Health. While specialty drugs (biologicals) remain a concern, those too begin losing patent protection in earnest in the next few years.

Health 2.0′s Boston Big Data Code-A-Thon

May 8, 2012

By Hemali Thakkar

This weekend, the famous Health 2.0 Code-A-Thon is coming to Boston! Hosted in conjunction with Health 2.0’s Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston, this one-day event taking place on May 11 – 12 aims to bring the best and most talented developers together to come up with new and creative applications to improve healthcare.

And that’s not all, a total of $10K in cash prize money will be distributed among three winning teams and four runner-ups (provided by the Office of the National Coordinator). The first place team will get free passes to Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston, the industry’s preeminent deal-making and partnership forum, and sessions on growth and commercialization strategies for today’s dynamic healthcare market. First place winners will also receive an all-expense paid trip to athenahealth’s More Disruption Please conference—a conference for entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors to come together to share innovative and disruptive ideas in the HC/HIT space in Maine this September.

Will Regina Holliday Become Health Care’s Rosa Parks?

May 5, 2012• 20

By Michael L. Millenson

The protest organized by Regina Holliday over a patient’s right to access their medical information is not quite the same magnitude as agitating for integration in 1950s-era Alabama. Yet there are intriguing similarities between the crusade Rosa Parks launched then and what Holliday is attempting today. Both involve a refusal to accept second-class status and a resolve to push back against entrenched institutions.

Parks’ story is well known. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery city bus in December, 1955, prompted her arrest and a sustained bus boycott by outraged black residents. That boycott’s success propelled a young Martin Luther King, Jr. to the forefront of the fight against segregation. Parks eventually came to be known as the “mother of the modern day civil rights movement.”

The Psychology of the ObamaCare Debate

May 4, 2012• 34

By Peter Ubel, MD

“How can the government make us buy health insurance? What gives them that right?”

Sitting on my left while our airplane raced above the clouds, Elizabeth was clearly upset about Obamacare. She wondered why the bill had to be so long, and why Obama would endorse a plan that doubled her health insurance costs. But nothing vexed her more than the individual mandate.

At least that’s what I though until I spoke with her at greater length, and she revealed a profound truth to me about people’s attitudes towards the mandate and towards Obamacare more generally: she showed me that deep down she liked the idea of the mandate, once she realized its important role in accomplishing goals people on all sides of the political spectrum care about deeply.

We were flying towards North Carolina the day before the Supreme Court held its oral arguments on Obama’s healthcare plan. Elizabeth had heard a great deal about the mandate. She read The Wall Street Journal regularly, in part because it was so relevant to her work in banking. And she enjoyed watching Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, but not Hannity, who she thought was “too extreme”. She was by no means a conservative extremist. She had major concerns about the banking industry for example, and as a Christian felt strongly that income inequality is a moral problem that neither party was addressing in an effective manner. But she was solidly Republican, no doubt about that, and she agreed with most people in that political party that Obamacare was hurting the economy. And above all she believed the health insurance mandate was “un-American.”

Enabling Patients to Be Part of Their Care

May 4, 2012• 7

By David Lansky, PhD

In May 2008, when the Roper poll asked a random sample of Americans “If your medical records and personal health information, such as test results and doctor’s instructions, were available to you online, how likely do you think you would be to access those records and information?” Sixty-five percent said they were somewhat, very, or extremely likely to access their records. In the February 2009 stimulus bill, Congress asked the Health IT Policy Committee “to facilitate secure access by an individual to such individual’s protected health information” and “… to facilitate secure access to patient information by a family member, caregiver, or guardian acting on behalf of a patient…”

CMS now proposes that in 2014, hospitals receiving the billions of dollars of Stage 2 federal EHR incentive payments must provide patients with electronic access to their hospital discharge information within 36 hours of leaving the hospital. CMS is not only asking hospitals to give patients reasonable access to their own current and actionable health information, but it’s also trying to help patients and families address the wasteful and dangerous rates of hospital readmission and failures in continuity of care that haunt American healthcare. But the American Hospital Association is arguing that “Establishing a web portal or other mechanism to provide patients online access to this magnitude of data is unrealistic and premature.”

A Fork in the Road to Meaningful Use

May 4, 2012

By Adrian Gropper, MD

The deadline for comments to Stage 2 is upon us and a clear fork has emerged for federal regulators. The cats and dogs here are institutional vs. patient engagement. The institutional fork has been taken by the American Hospital Association. The patient fork is exemplified by the National Partnership for Women and Families. The primary argument is over patient access to their own information. The draft regulation suggests a 36 hour (or 4 days in other circumstances) delay. The AHA wants 30 days. Some patient advocates are seeking immediate and highly convenient access.

The fork in the road for federal regulators, with some $30 Billion dollars of incentives in hand, is whether to micromanage the institutions or to encourage patient-centered innovation. This choice is deeply entangled in the $Trillion realities of payment reform.

The micromanagement of institutions through increasingly complex regulations on EHR vendors, clerical and clinical staff seems like slow torture. We have institutions begging for relief. Large vendors are consolidating their lock-in business model as the barriers to entry into the health information market get higher and higher. Quality transparency is controversial and price transparency is almost unimaginable.

Why Do We Trust Doctors?

May 3, 2012• 4

By Richard Reece, MD

The National Journal has released a Special Report. The Report features a series of four articles: Restoration Calls – Fixing America’s Crumbling Foundation. Among these articles is: “Why Do We Trust Doctors?” It contains results of a Gallup poll, showing trust in doctors is at all-time high of 70% over the last ten years.

This is intriguing considering numerous media articles on physician personal profiteering and physician partnerships in technologies such as imaging equipment for financial gain.

The article begins, ”We’re cynics about insurance companies and critics of big health companies. So why do we still believe in physicians?”

Why indeed? The author of the April 26 piece, Margot Sanger-Katz, tells the story of 60 year old Mary Morse-Dwelley of Maine who has undergone 22 operations to close an abdominal incision and who has had her gallbladder, uterus, and 2 feet of intestine removed. She has spent two years in bed. Despite this long surgical ordeal, she implicitly trusts her surgeon. So does the American public, if you believe Gallup.

When patients are asked why they trust doctors, patients say they see doctors as someone who is trying their best to help them. They do not see them as agents of government, insurance companies, or institutions. They trust the interpersonal face-to-face relationship and the motives of their doctors.

The Testing Glut

May 3, 2012• 9

By H. Gilbert Welch

In case you missed it, a recommendation came out last month that physicians cut back on using 45 common tests and treatments. In addition, patients were advised to question doctors who recommend such things as antibiotics for mild sinusitis, CT scans for an uncomplicated headache or a repeat colonoscopy within 10 years of a normal exam.

The general idea wasn’t all that new — my colleagues and I have been questioning many of the same tests and treatments for years. What was different this time was the source of the recommendations. They came from the heart of the medical profession: the medical specialty boards and societies representing cardiologists, radiologists, gastroenterologists and other doctors. In other words, they came from the very groups that stand to benefit from doing more, not less.

Nine specialty societies contributed five recommendations each to the list (others are expected to contribute in the future). The recommendations each started with the word “don’t” — as in “don’t perform,” “don’t order,” “don’t recommend.”

Could American medicine be changing?

For years, medical organizations have been developing recommendations and guidelines focused on things doctors should do. The specialty societies have been focused on protecting the financial interests of their most profligate members and have been reluctant to acknowledge the problem of overuse. Maybe they are now owning up to the problem.