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Kent Dicks from MedApps does a very nice job on Fox Business News. Kent explains what his company’s cell(phone)-based transmission solution does, why it’s not a privacy threat, who else is in the market, and what the upside is—cheap consistent device data from patients stored in Healthvault or other record systems.
Here’s the link
Meanwhile can anyone tell me why every business anchor these days is an incredibly hot model type?
I met with Bob Quinn the CTO and Geoff Rutledge, the CMO, of Epocrates at HIMSS last week. The company has a big footprint in mobile (and web) reference content for physicians. The big news is that it’s looking to move into an EMR product. Bob and Geoff explain what they do and where they’re going.
Epocrates from Health 2.0 on Vimeo.
One of my interns was “running the list” with me last week (giving me a thumbnail update on the plans for each of our inpatients). It was standard stuff until he got to Ms. X, a 80ish-year-old woman admitted with urosepsis who was now ready for discharge. “I stopped her antibiotics, advanced her diet, called her daughter, and YoJo’ed her.”
Say whaa?
I’m pretty sure that the most valuable thing I’ve done in my 15 years running UCSF’s inpatient service has been to convince the hospital to hire a discharge scheduler, Yolanda Jones, a delightful woman with a big smile and the world’s most thankless job. When a patient is ready for discharge, the interns send Yolanda a note with a list of follow-up appointments, radiology studies, and other outpatient tests that need to be scheduled. She makes all the appointments, then calls the patient and intern with the info. Our hospital would cease to function if not for Yolanda; she is the unsung hero of the medical service.
And now, the process of asking Yolanda Jones to schedule discharge appointments had become a verb.
RememberItNow! is a feisty little start-up that’s aiming at the medication reminder/management space. I like the feature set and the approach, and I hope the Pam Swigley the engaging CEO gets some traction. It’s launching officially on Friday
But what I really like is their use of this cool presentation software called Prezi to give their demo. So to kill 2 birdies with one stone, here it is — click the arrow and enjoy.
Allscirpts’ CEO Glen Tullman has had a good year. Allscripts’ stock is up four-fold, sales are going well and some people think that ARRA/HITECH’s fillup to the healthcare IT industry is mostly his doing–he was an early fundraiser for Obama. Any clouds on the horizon? You’ll have to watch the interview I did with him at HIMSS to find out.
All eyes are on Toyota’s recall of 8.5 million vehicles due to faulty gas pedals and brakes. The recall has sparked congressional hearings, a probe by the U.S. Department of Transportation, possible criminal charges stemming from a federal grand jury investigation and numerous civil lawsuits, all in the name of driver safety.
This aggressive response to Toyota’s mistakes is appropriate, even though the human toll from its miscues has been, thankfully, relatively modest – 34 alleged deaths and a few hundred injuries. Not to downplay this misery, but in stunning contrast, consider this: More than 100,000 Americans die annually in U.S. hospitals because of avoidable medical errors, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which also says that medical errors rank as America’s eighth leading cause of death. This is higher than auto accidents (about 45,000) and breast cancer (about 43,000). And the problems don’t end here. Studies show that approximately 19% of medications administered in hospitals are done so in error, injuring about 1.3 million each year, according to the FDA.
I saw a patient today and looked back at a previous note, which said the following: “stressed out due to insurance.” It didn’t surprise me, and I didn’t find it funny; I see a lot of this. Too much. This kind of thing could be written on a lot of patients’ charts. I suspect the percentage of patients who are “stressed out due to insurance” is fairly high.
My very next patient started was a gentleman who has fairly good insurance who I had not seen for a long time. He was not taking his medications as directed, and when asked why he had not come in recently he replied, “I can’t afford to see you, doc. You’re expensive.”
Expensive? A $20 copay is expensive? Yes, to people who are on multiple medications, seeing multiple doctors, struggling with work, and perhaps not managing their money well, $20 can be a barrier to care. I may complain that the patients have cable TV, smoke, or eat at Taco Bell, but adding a regular $20 charge to an already large medical bill of $100, $200/month, or more is more than some people can stomach. I see a lot of this too.Continue reading…
THCB would not exist without the support of our generous sponsors. So we’d like to give a shout to our friends at Eliza, our latest corporate sponsors.
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By MICHAEL MILLENSON
The Joint Commission, which accredits four-fifths of the nation’s hospitals, is being accused of misleading consumers about the quality of care at those hospitals and then ignoring suggestions on how to correct the problem.
“The organization that accredits hospitals around the country, and voices support for transparency about hospital quality, has a Web site that obscures the reality of many hospitals’ performance,” said Charles Ornstein, president of the Association for Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) and a reporter for the public-interest journalism group ProPublica . In a March 1 letter sent to Dr. Mark R. Chassin, the Joint Commission’s president and CEO, Ornstein noted that not only has the group not addressed the “navigational issues” raised by AHCJ more than two years ago, but problems that make the commission’s QualityCheck site even less useful have cropped up.
For instance, that “Gold Seal of Approval” for your local hospital? Perhaps it should be called a Gold Seal of Possible Approval. Says the AHCJ: “[It] is misleading because hospitals with conditional accreditation or preliminary denial of accreditation still receive the same gold seal as fully accredited facilities.”Continue reading…
What happens next in Massachusetts with insurance reimbursement rates now that many of the facts and figures have been made public?
Here’s what I see. The dominant parties in the state on whose watch the disparities in the marketplace have taken place — Blue Cross Blue Shield and Partners Healthcare System — face financial and political problems, respectively. The PHS rates that are so much higher than others’ cause a major financial drain for BCBS. They do so in the short run just by the degree of current utilization. The effect is compounded over the long run, though, as PHS has a competitive advantage vis-à-vis other systems in recruiting community-based doctors and thereby brings more and more referrals into its hospitals. That these differentials have now been made public by the state creates a political embarrassment for PHS, which has often asserted that its creation brought about substantial economies of scale through integration of care.
I suspect that these factors will lead to a negotiated agreement between BCBS and PHS, where PHS takes a bit of a haircut in its current reimbursement contracts. Not so much that it dramatically affects the PHS bottom line, but enough so that both parties can say that they have cooperatively acted to slow down the rate of health care spending in the state. Will the new rates be anywhere near the statewide average? No way. Will they do anything to offset the competitive advantage that PHS has had or will continue to have? No.
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