President Obama has repeatedly promised
that providing every American affordable access to quality health care
won't cost more money than we'll save through reform, but he's recently
raised the stakes even further. Health care reform, he has said, would
"foster economic growth" and "unleash America's economic potential."
Is that realistic?
THCB & Health 2.0 are happy to be a small part of a very important declaration, made today by a mix of patients, physicians, technologists and concerned citizens. It’s a Declaration of Health Data Rights, and it’s extremely important because access to usable data is a very pressing problem in the health care system, and one that we have the opportunity to solve if we bake the concept into regulation and practice now, as electronic health data becomes more pervasive. Here’s the declaration:
More information about how you can support this declaration, how it was created, a FAQ and what you can do to get involved is all at www.healthdatarights.org
The dream of reason did not take power into account…Modern medicine is one of those extraordinary works of reason…But medicine is also a world of power.
-Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 1984
Today’s unveiling of a Declaration of Health Data Rights is an important action, long overdue, that represents a collaborative effort by a group of health care professionals – activists, entrepreneurs, technologists and clinicians – all colleagues we hold in high esteem.
The Declaration’s several points arise from a single, simple premise: that patients own their own data, and that that ownership cannot be pre-empted by a professional or an institution. And there lies its power, especially in the context of early 21st Century health care. It is a transformative ideal that currently is not the norm. But we join our colleagues in declaring that it should be.Continue reading…
I have a good friend at Duke University
– Dr. Ed Hammond. (Ed has been involved in advancing electronic
health information for quite some time – probably longer than he'd like
to remember.) Ed once told me that to get a perspective on how
long we – (our nation) has been assessing the potential of automating
health information you'd have to go back to the introduction of Medicare
in 1965 when President Johnson signed the legislation and officially
enrolled Harry Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary.
With the Washington insiders at politico.com
reporting this weekend that health care reform appears to be in “real
jeopardy,” and the Senate Finance Committee so uneasy that they have
decided to delay reform bill markup until after the July Fourth recess,
it’s increasingly clear that an approach of layering more and more
fixes onto the present system isn’t going to work.
Today’s Boston Globe ran a story (page one, no less!) announcing our grant to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to run a three-site demonstration of opening up physicians’ notes to patients. That’s not just making labs, drugs, allergies, etc. available to patients – it’s giving them access to the actual notes that the physician records about a visit. Now these notes are technically available now – under HIPAA each of us has a right to our full medical records (of which physician notes are a part), but the process for obtaining them is often slow, cumbersome and even expensive in some cases. Under this project, called Open Notes, patients will receive a secure email after the note has been completed and they can see it right away. They’ll also be prompted to review the note prior to their next visit. So instead of limiting access to the very determined, access will be easy for anyone who’s mildly interested.
Why would we fund this? Several reasons, really. First, is that at the Pioneer Portfolio, we’re very interested in patient-centered innovation. Let’s face it: virtually every trend suggests that people are going to have to become much more engaged in their care and in taking care of themselves. And, as the pioneers of shared decision-making, patient centeredness, patient activation, online support groups and the health 2.0 community have shown us, real benefits come from this engagement. So much of the energy and excitement in health care today is coming from the patient/consumer side of the equation. So it’s a space where we believe we will find many innovations that can ultimately transform health.Continue reading…
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This is something that’s been puzzling me for a few weeks. We all know that insurers are very good at making sure that they insure healthier risks than average. In the individual market they do this openly, by underwriting against poorer risks. Those “risks” (who are most of the people with the really tragic stories) end up uninsured or in massively over-stretched state major risk pools.
Health care reform alone won’t make
America healthier. We’ve seen this basic message as recently as yesterday,
in Ezra Klein’s piece for the American Prospect, “Wealth-Care Reform.” At the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America, we’ve been studying prevention, wellness,
and the broader factors that influence good health for nearly two years.
And as the health care reform debate has heated up over the last few
weeks, we’ve seen eight signs that health reformers and leaders from
all sectors are starting to get the message that there’s more to health
than health care.
By
Like most doctors, I was busy seeing a full schedule of patients when President Obama addressed members of the American Medical Association at their annual meeting in Chicago. The speech was billed as a crucial confrontation over health reform, and anticipation had been building for quite some time. So I was too busy to learn anything about his remarks and the response until I got home.
Then again, I’m not a member of the AMA. I never have been. Neither are very many of my physician friends and colleagues. In fact, the odds are that your doctor isn’t a member of the AMA, because at best, only between 25-30% of the approximately 800,000 doctors in country belong to it. And a good percentage (up to half of members according to one report) of those include residents and medical students, who get big discounts on membership and a free subscription to a journal when they join.Continue reading…
And, I’ve been in the business for 37 years.First, let me
stipulate we really need a system of universal care where everyone gets
to have insurance. But we don’t yet so certain rules are unavoidable
until we do.
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