A wonderful sad and happy story about someone who never thought disease could happen to them. (It’s relatively long and plays in sections or you can go to the original site)
From a system/policy perspective, the role of complementary and allopathic medicine is pretty interesting. But this is a story about a fighter.
Paul Taylor is CEO of Ozarks Community Hospital, a teeny 2 hospital system catering to the poor and senior populations in rural Missouri and Arkansas. He thinks that he’s figured out a way to deliver health care at government rates and is incensed that every other hospital claims it can’t make it on what Medicare pays. (That’s they I call him a renegade–I don’t mean that his hospital is called “Renegade”!) He also gets much less from the local Blues than he does from Medicare for the same services.
I wrote about Paul a while back and he sounded like a guy with interesting ideas on how to fix health care. So I called him up to see if he would be a good interview–and he didn’t disappoint!
I'm excited to announce the latest program coming from Health 2.0 – The Health 2.0 Show with Indu & Matthew! This monthly webinar series will focus on news from the Health 2.0 community, a look at some cool new technologies, and interviews with industry leaders.
January 19, 2010
11 am PT / 2 pm ET
We’ll start the series off with a look at what lies in store for Health 2.0 in 2010 – including updates from the Advisors, the Accelerator and exciting new partnerships.
We’ll also chat with Thomas Goetz of Wired Magazine about his upcoming book,The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Age of Personalized Medicine and his thoughts on technology, personalized medicine, and how it all relates to Health 2.0.
For more information and to register, check out: http://www.health2con.com/webinars.
For a Broadway stage, the set is simple and spare – a long, white leather couch, a handful of wooden tables and chairs. No ornamentation is needed; the stories being told on the stage are what command the audience’s attention. Let Me Down Easy is health reform as poignant, funny and gripping theater.
A supermodel compares the high-powered physicians a cosmetics company gets her after she signs a lucrative contract to the doctors she had access to during her working-class childhood. A middle-aged woman emotionally refuses dialysis because of the terrible injuries her daughter sustained while undergoing dialysis when a hospital’s mistake left her covered in blood. And a cancer patient hospitalized with a post-chemotherapy fever describes being told not to take it personally that her chart has been lost: “that happens here quite a bit.”
Every word is true, every story describes a personal struggle with illness, dying and the medical care that sometimes happens in between. Twenty people speak, each in a separately titled vignette, but only one person appears on stage. That’s Anna Deavere Smith, who carefully selects verbatim excerpts from interviews she conducted and then meticulously mimics those interviewees’ body language and speech patterns in a manner so convincing that, in the miracle that is theater, she disappears into her characters. Some are well-known – Lance Armstrong, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards – others are not – a musicologist, a Buddhist monk, a rodeo bullrider.
By BILL KRAMER
I love Atul Gawande’s writings on health care.
He has a rare talent for describing technical details of health care, insurance and finances in terms that most people can understand. His recent article in the New Yorker discussed the current health reform bills’ approach to curbing costs, using the agricultural industry as a potential model.
One of his basic points is similar to one I have made before. He describes two kinds of problems: “those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health care coverage belongs to the first category . . . Problems of the second kind [referring to rising health care costs], by contrast, are never solved, exactly; they are managed.”
I would frame it somewhat differently. The two basic kinds of problems are those, which are amenable to a government solution, and those which are best addressed using decentralized market forces.
As many involved in the worlds of Health 2.0 and Information Therapy know, some of the most interesting experiments in the world of patient-physician engagement have been happening in the somewhat unlikely environs of small town Oklahoma. There the City of Duncan has put its employees (and their providers) into a system that incents (but doesn’t mandate) physicians to practice according to accepted guidelines, and incents (but doesn’t mandate) patients to read information prescribed by their physicians about their treatments (and tests them about it). The system then asks each party to rate the other.
It sounds simple and frankly, compared to much in health care, it is. The system is supplied by MedEncentive, an Oklahoma City firm led by the charming and engaging Jeff Greene. While I remain fascinated by MedEncentive’s program (and FD MedEncentive has sponsored the Health 2.0 Conference in the past), it’s perhaps grown a little more slowly than Jeff and other fans might have liked—given the scope of the problem.
But the results have been impressive in reducing costs (mostly by reducing hospitalizations) and increasing patient involvement. Yesterday MedEncentive released a five year retrospective. The key finding?:
City of Duncan costs for the most recent year was 8.6% less than five years ago prior to implementing the Program, which is 34.9% less than the projected costs. The resultant four year savings equates to an 8:1 return on investment. (emphasis added)
Jeff abandoned a lucrative business in physician practice management to have a go at this intractable problem. Five years on he deserves plaudits for what he and his team have achieved, and hopefully we’ll see much more innovation like this mushrooming in the future.
Given the relatively lightweight nature of the intervention, I’m amazed that many much larger payers/employers haven’t given it a try. After all, whatever else they’re doing doesn’t seem to be exactly working too well!
From a deeply depressing survey of the unemployed in today’s NY Times:
Nearly half of respondents said they did not have health insurance, with the vast majority citing job loss as a reason, a notable finding given the tug of war in Congress over a health care overhaul. The poll offered a glimpse of the potential ripple effect of having no coverage. More than half characterized the cost of basic medical care as a hardship.
Meanwhile what is Joe Lieberman concerned about? Playing politics against liberals who, correctly, think he erred terribly in his support for Bush’s war and McCain’s candidacy.
And even if we pass legislation, when does the help arrive for these unemployed? 2013.
By JEFF GOLDSMITH
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office weighed in on the biggest economic imponderable in the health care debate: how private health insurance premiums will behave under health reform. Building on its December 2008 CBO health insurance market analysis, CBO forecast largely benign effects from health reform’s private market reforms and subsidies on the vast majority of the presently insured (e.g. voting public).
According to CBO, only 17% of Americans in the so-called non-group market–largely individuals–would see premium increases in 2016 (the CBO reference year), because they would be required to purchase fatter benefits with less economic risk. CBO believes that the other 83% of the presently insured will see little or no change.
Analysis of how the health insurance market will behave under health reform has become ferociously politicized. After the infamous PriceWaterhouseCoopers study sponsored by health insurers suggested possible large premium increases, the CBO report might provide cover for members of Congress who are contemplating irreversibly tying the federal budget to a volatile “private” insurance market. I think the fiscal risks of a partially federalized private health benefit are significantly greater than CBO has suggested.
They said it couldn’t happen in Europe, that social media and online tools wouldn’t catch on, because the healthcare context was soooo different from the US. They said that Europeans don’t worry about access and cost, that they aren’t looking for information online because they they trust their doctors utterly and fully, and that European doctors don’t go online, except if they're Scandinavian.
Well, it just isn’t so! True collective intelligence will tell you that participatory medicine is a natural human instinct and that Health 2.0 is kicking up a storm in Europe this winter! Consumers and professionals are generating content everywhere, even though they don't necessarily cross language or country borders. Unfortunately, no one European organization is studying consumer health Internet usage trends on the same basis year after year, as is the Pew Foundation in the U.S. Nonetheless, there is empiric proof; during the current flu epidemic, information from informal sources in Europe is fully surpassing official data. Wikipedia is cited in a recent study by Manhattan Research as one of the most regularly used sites for physicians and consumers across Europe. Private initiative has generated many significant consumer/patient communities, several major physician community portals, online consultation sites, and more.
But, while users are generally "with it", Europe institutions are not. What is at stake is the future of ill-prepared healthcare organizations and institutions and the regulated healthcare industries.
Earlier this month, the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center opened nominations for its annual gala honoring those who have stood out in the fight against cancer, the one hundred. Each year, one hundred people from all walks of life are honored by the Boston-based hospital for a variety of achievements. Doctors, nurses and researchers have been recognized for ground-breaking research and stellar patient care while those outside of the medical community, like Susan Zuker, were recognized for lobbying the state legislature for a vanity license plate that would raise money for cancer research, or the Boston-based “Cops for Kids with Cancer” program that supports families with children who have cancer. Last year, Elizabeth Edwards was also honored and was the keynote speaker of the gala. To nominate someone you think should be recognized for their outstanding fight against cancer, visit here
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