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Are We Adequately Securing Personal Health Information?

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By BRIAN KLEPPER and DAVID KIBBEBrian Klepper, MD

In a discussion about electronic health records (EHRs) a couple weeks ago, one of the Human Resource team members at a prospective client said, “I don’t believe it’s possible to secure electronic health data. It’s always an accident waiting to happen.”

There is some truth to that. More and more, our Personal Health Information (PHI) is in electronic formats that allow it to be exchanged with professionals and organizations throughout the health care continuum. It is highly unlikely that each contact point has the protections to wrap that data up tightly, away from those who would exploit it.

Of course, PHI is among the richest examples of personal data, often with all the key ingredients prized by identify thieves: social security number, birthday, phone numbers, address, and even credit card information. This should give health care organizations considerable pause.

Then consider that, while paper charts contain the same information, electronic files often aggregate hundreds of thousands or even millions of records, information treasures troves for someone really focused on acquiring, mining and making use of the data.

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Health 2.0 Europe–My Take

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By MATTHEW HOLT

I’m back in San Francisco after a fabulous Health 2.0 Europe Conference in Paris. We were welcomed wonderfully to Europe by our partner Denise Silber, her colleagues at Basil Strategies and all the fabulous people we met there. We’ve since heard lots of great comments and feedback from conference attendees, speakers and sponsors. Going to Paris in the spring sounds like a lot of fun and it is. But putting on any conference is a great deal of hard work, and Indu & I would like to thank Denise and her team (Miles & Rhys), as well as our colleagues Lizzie Dunklee who ran the production and Hillary McCowen who ran registration, sponsorship and front of house. We had help from some great volunteers (thanks for all the coffee Pauline!), excellent simultaneous translation, and Alex, Raphael & Stephane from Image Media did a great job with AV. We even (eventually) tracked down all the IML Voting devices (including the one that went to Boston!).

I’d also like to thank all of our speakers, sponsors and attendees—especially the speakers whom we put through our rigorous demo training program, the sponsors who took a chance on us, and the regional ambassadors and media partners. There were nearly 550 attendees once all was said and done (all squeezed into a venue that seats 500)! We sense that the conference signaled the emergence of a real Health 2.0 community in Europe. Of course all the great work that we demonstrated on stage has been going on for some time, but perhaps this was the first time that it’s been gathered together—not to mention gone drinking at Les Invalides!

So as is almost traditional, here’s a few thoughts from me about my impressions. (By the way, Denise has extensive thoughts over on her blog too). As ever these are not definitive—there were many many great contributions that I won’t mention for reasons of space, and every speaker worked really hard and contributed to a great conference, but here are a few thoughts that stuck out for me.

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Paris in the Springtime

By MATTHEW HOLT

While we were rehearsing for Health 2.0 we had to take a quick break to look out the window at this. Not bad, eh? You may recognize the building in the bottom left.

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Don Berwick: An Activist Takes the Reins at CMS

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By BOB WACHTER, MDPicture 34

While the health reform bill will have many effects, one of its most profound will be to unshackle the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Under the legislation, CMS is now far freer to undertake a variety of pilot programs and demonstration projects designed to improve quality, safety and efficiency, and to convert the successful ones into policy. And, if that wasn’t enough for those who have long been praying for a more activist CMS, we now learn that President Obama will select Don Berwick, the world’s most prominent advocate for healthcare quality and safety, to be the next CMS administrator. Although I’ve sparred a bit with Don over the years on matters of philosophy, I think he is a superb choice.

Don’s story is well known – a Harvard pediatrician and policy expert who became passionate about improving healthcare well before it was fashionable, he ultimately left his full-time academic perch to pursue his calling. In 1991, he founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, which ran on a shoestring for its first decade, fueled largely by the considerable power of Don’s vision and personality.Continue reading…

Human

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By ROB LAMBERTS

If there is a cPicture 35entral theme to my work, it is this:  medicine is a human thing.

On the Facebook page of my podcast, I recently asked for readers to tell me some of the “war stories” they have from the doctor’s office.  What are some of the bad things doctors do wrong?  I quickly followed this with the flip-side, asking readers to comment on the best interactions that they’ve had with their doctors.

The response was overwhelming, and equally quick to both rant and rave.  They told stories about doctors who didn’t listen, explain, or even talk with them.  They told about arrogance and disconnectedness from the people from whom they were seeking help.  They also told about doctors who took extra effort to listen and to reach out in communication.  They talked about doctors who genuinely seemed to value them as humans.Continue reading…

Getting Over The New Normal

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By MICHAEL TURPIN

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Charles DarwinMichael turpin

In her 1969 Book, On Death and Dying, Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross describes the five stages of grief.  Over a 27 year career marked by mergers, acquisitions, and perpetual change, I have come to accept these five stages as necessary rites of passage that humans must endure as they navigate the inevitable shoals of change. It seems we all must endure denial, anger, bargaining and depression before we finally break through to acceptance.

While we all intellectually agree that our healthcare system is broken and is in profound need of change, most preferred that all the heavy lifting required to reduce healthcare costs as a percentage of US GDP, occurred on someone else’s watch.  As Woody Allen once quipped, “ I don’t mind dying.  I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”Continue reading…

THCB relaunch to change focus to renewable energy, fly fishing, sailing

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By Matthew Holt

The Patient Reassurance and Consumer Total Insurance Confirmation Access legislation was signed into law last week, and the powers that be at THCB have had a radical rethink about what we should do next.

I myself have led this effort. Given that all the major problems in the health care system in the US have more or less been solved by the recent law, it’s apparent that a blog focusing on only health care is going to be pretty superfluous. Some of the more frequent and most important THCB contributors are have also subtly told us that they’re ready to move onto other things.

Brian Klepper told me that with a combination of both leadership from Congress and employers “85% of everything I think we need in health care is done.” Brian plans to spend even more time sailing his catamaran off the coast of Florida and down to the Caribbean where he’ll be focusing on his new business with David Kibbe of importing cheap Cuban rum to Florida—at least until the embargo is lifted. Bob Wachter has decided that with a combination of the new health care bill and with Don Berwick taking over all his work on patient safety, hospital care is about as good as it’s going to get. Bob is going to stay in health care, but he’s taking a crack at the issue of the rural physician shortage by moving to Idaho to start a solo primary care practice. He’ll be opening his new practice just as soon as the bunker is built and stocked with sufficient supplies.

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Reform: Round 2

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By JOE FLOWER

Joe flower It’s coming back!

The health care reform debate is only through the first round. In a few years, as early as 2013 or 2014, we are likely to see another round, with at least as much whacked-out drama as this one. But the cry will not be, “Bring back the good old days!” The cry will be, “These costs are killing us! Do something! Now!” This next round will be entirely focused on draconian cost-cutting.

The push for reform was about three things: Cost, quality, and access. Well, one out of three is not bad. The bill we got will eventually do a pretty good job on access, but it does little substantive or forceful about the other two. Quality is not a political issue with any grip; despite what we wonks and practitioners know, the public still doesn’t think that quality is a big problem. But cost? Big time. Continue reading…

Really Managing Care and Costs

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By BRIAN KLEPPER

One of my favorite health care stories is about Jerry Reeves MD, who in 2004 took the helm of a 300,000 life health plan in Las Vegas, including about 110,000 union members, and drove so much waste out of that system – without reducing benefits and while improving quality – that the union gave its members a 60 cent/hour raise. There was no magic here. It was a straightforward and rigorously managed combination of proven approaches.

Dr. Reeves’ work betrayed the lie that tremendous health care costs are inevitable. To a large degree, the nation’s major health plans abetted this perception when they effectively stopped doing medical management in 1999. (Most have recently begun managing again in earnest.) The result was an explosion in cost – 4 times general inflation and 3.5 times workers earnings between 1999 and 2009 – that has priced a growing percentage of individual and corporate purchasers out of the health coverage market, dangerously destabilizing the health care marketplace and the larger US economy. In 2008, PriceWaterhouse Coopers published a scathing analysis suggesting that $1.2 trillion (55%) of the $2.2 trillion health care spend at that time was waste.Continue reading…