This past week at the Health 2.0 conference, A.D.A.M., Inc demoed their recently launched iphone application Medzio, which connects users with a network of healthcare services and free expert health advice. It's a very cool application and an exciting new
tool. Click the link below to be taken directly to Apple itunes Store, where you can check out the application for yourself.
For those of you who weren’t at Health 2.0 Meets Ix to hear from the mouths of the four horsemen (Halamka, Sands, Zeiger & deBronkhart) here is Google’s Roni Zeiger’s version of what went wrong with the “incorrect data from BIDMC to Google Health” story and what they’re going to do to fix it.
Matthew’s note: imagine that several of your intellectual health care policy wonk heroes were teaming up with at least one big time industry player that you sometimes love to hate, but who’s always a great source of thinking. Imagine that they were getting together in an intimate setting to spend a day focusing on health care reform. Imagine that two of them are behind the two ideas you consider the best for the future of health care in the US. And it’s all just down the street from you. Then imagine that because of a prior client commitment you can’t go. Now you know how I feel, but it doesn't have to be that way for you!
The Capstone Conference: Fresh Thinking on Health Care Reform will bring together influential health care reform professionals from academia, industry and government for a day of presentations and discussion. The Conference represents the culminating activity of the FRESH-Thinking Project, which has conducted eight workshops over three years on health care reform.
Thursday, May 14, 2009 at the Quadrus Conference Center, 2400 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA from 9:30 am – 5:30 pm
TOPICS of INTEREST:
* Prospects for National Health Care Reform* Funding and Access to Health Care* Organization And Delivery Of Medical Care* Fostering Innovation In a Value–Conscious Environment* What Health Care Reform Means to Physicians, Employers and the Public?
The panel is stellar: Alain Enthoven, Victor Fuchs, Alan Garber, Leonard Schaeffer, John Shoven, & Wallace R. Hawley. For more information, www.fresh-thinking.org.
Write and tell me how it was. Or if you can be there and can write for THCB, let me know
America's health crisis does not have either a single cause or a silver bullet solution. Yet previous attempts at reform have often focused too narrowly on the financing and delivery of health care. In a report released last week, a Commission of national health experts convened by the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC) emphasizes a wide spectrum of actions needed to become the healthiest nation in the world. The Commission on U.S. Federal Leadership in Health and Medicine: Charting Future Directions that we co-chair has identified seven strategies to mobilize all sectors of American society to help put "health" into our nation's health care system.
The report, New Horizons for a Healthy America: Recommendations to the New Administration, adopts a comprehensive perspective in framing its seven recommended strategies for a high-performance health care system and a healthier nation. These recommendations include:
Issue a Presidential Call to Action for a "Healthy U.S." The
Administration, working with Congress, should set a bold framework for
action for improving health in the United States (Healthy U.S.),
mobilizing all sectors of society and emphasizing comprehensive health
promotion, disease prevention, and the delivery of high quality medical
care .
Establish "Health in All Policies." Marshal the leadership and
resources of the more than 40 federal agencies that address health into
a coordinated, synergistic effort.
My lefty friends at Moveon.org emailed me (and a few million others) appalled that Rick Scott’s group is going to be spending $1 million running ads attacking the as yet officially non-existent Baucus/Daschle/deParle/Obama health plan. Now that’s not exactly a surprise. Rick Scott has been on the offensive for a while now and in the spirit of inclusiveness (or the more cynical among you might say, to start a fight in an empty house) THCB ran his op-ed a while back. Frankly it was pretty tough to figure out what he was “for” but it’s clear what he’s against—the evils of Canada and the UK.
Yesterday I had a little fun teasing some Norwegians over here to learn about the US health care system. I asked them what they wanted to learn about, and one of them said “what about the 48 million uninsured”. I told her that Americans were a kind and generous people, and that there couldn’t possibly be anyone here uninsured or suffering because of it, and obviously the two Michael’s at Cato and the nutjob prof at Harvard prove me right about uninsurance being a) voluntary and b) the fault of three Medicaid clerks in New York state who forgot to print the enrollment forms in Spanish. OK, OK, I changed my tune a little a few seconds later.
But that remains basically the screed of the Canada bashers. They say that those evil Stalinists in the UK and Canada are the same (even though they’re not), and no one gets any care. Whereas here it’s all sweetness light, teddy bears, puppies and all the MRIs you can eat.
However, I am beginning to tentatively that the lack of mainstream industry support for Rick Scott signals a couple of things—besides the fact that the mainstream is somewhat nervous of being led by an unconvicted fraudster man whose company settled with the government for $1.7 billion after it fired him.
So the party's over, the buntings are down, the #health2con tweets—more than 3,000 of them—are drying up but recorded here, and the Health 2.0 & Ix teams have returned to their respective coasts. Even though this is the smaller of the two annual Health 2.0 Conferences, because we were co-hosting this one with Ix, it was not a small event. There were more than 500 people, some 60 main stage speakers & demo-ers, another 12 or so in the Deep Dives and Launch, some 90 people at the Health 2.0 Accelerator meeting in the morning, and a whole lot of deep conversations going on in the Exhibit Hall, in the corridors and at the party at the top of the Prudential Tower—where else can you talk Health 2.0 & Ix and watch live base-runners at Fenway park (albeit they looked like ants!).
If you were there, please give us your feedback in the survey (but only if you were there please!)
Bloggers across the web are holding a blog rally in support of Roxana Saberi, who is spending her birthday on a hunger strike in Tehran's Evin Prison, where she has been incarcerated for espionage. According to NPR, "The Iranian Political Prisoners Association lists hundreds of people whose names you would be even less likely to recognize: students, bloggers, dissidents, and others who, in a society that lacks a free press, dare to practice free expression."
We here at THCB have decided to join the Blue Ribbon campaign (Blue is for blogging) to honor and show support for those journalists, bloggers, students and writers imprisoned in Evin Prison, nicknamed "Evin University," and other prisons around the world, for speaking and writing their minds.
Please consider placing a blue ribbon on your blog or website this week to show your support. Also, please ask others to join this blog rally.
Despite the extreme inside-the-Beltway focus on healthcare reform, there’s been hardly a mention of tackling reform of our long-term care system. This is curious when you stop to consider that these services are used by the same seniors who use the most healthcare resources and that they account for hundreds of billions of dollars of personal and federal spending. Our existing system strains already-stretched government resources and family networks and will become only more expensive as our nation ages.
A new report finds that a proposal to reform Medicare post-acute care could provide the funding needed to reform the long-term care system, resulting in overall savings of $35 billion over ten years—all the while improving efficiency in our post-acute care (PAC) system and creating a new, consistent, voluntary long-term care (LTC) benefit for seniors.
Reforming PAC is, in simple speak, a must-do. Currently, Medicare payments for post-acute medical care – the kind of care that follows a stroke or major fall – are first based on where the care is provided, not on the actual patient condition and needs. There is widespread bipartisan agreement that reforming this disjointed, inefficient payment system could enhance care while also adding a healthy dose of spending discipline to Medicare. In addition, this could be a great area to showcase better evidence-based decision-making.
The question becomes what to do with the money generated through PAC reform. The proposal at hand – which was developed by the American advanced by the American Health Care Association, the National Center for Assisted Living, and the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care – directs those savings toward the creation of a new, fully federalized, and voluntary LTC benefit system.
And there is certainly rationale for reforming LTC financing. The nation currently spends more than $230 billion annually on a LTC system that inadequately protects today’s senior population from the financial devastation of a long-term disabling condition such as Alzheimer’s disease or stroke. Seniors often rely on their savings, home equity, or children to pay for their care. In the current economic climate, these sources of financing have proven to be a house of cards rather than a stable foundation—a problem that will gain urgency as the Baby Boomers swell the ranks of our Medicare population and families slowly recover from deep financial losses.
Specifically, the proposal seeks to combine PAC with LTC reform through the following measures:
Using methods and assumptions similar to those employed by the Congressional Budget Office, Avalere Health built a model to assess the federal costs of these changes. According to the results, these Medicare PAC reforms would likely generate $81 billion in savings over 10 years of operation through more cost-effective placement of Medicare patients in PAC settings. Those savings would offset the costs of launching a federal LTC program, which by Avalere estimates would cost $46 billion over 10 years.
The total 10-year program savings is $35 billion.
Any meaningful reform effort will involve a careful analysis of choices, policy options, and trade-offs. This report illustrates how these types of tradeoffs and investments could play out—this time using PAC savings to fund urgently needed improvements to our LTC system. It is precisely these types of policy choices that will guide this new chapter in national healthcare reform.
Anne Tumlinson has nearly two decades of experience in long-term care financing policy. She is currently a vice president at Avalere Health, directing research and analysis on post-acute and long-term care policy for government, foundation, and commercial clients. She has co-published work with health reform experts including Jeanne Lambrew.
I was staring at the program cover for the special joint conference between Health 2.0 and the Center for Information Therapy going on here in Boston when a sudden realization jumped out at me: both of these movements talks about the consumer, yet both are disconnected from the consumer in an important way any consumer would notice but none of us wonks have commented upon.Before we get to the basis for this flash of insight, allow me to provide some context. One of the themes of this conference is exploring where Information Therapy and Health 2.0 converge and diverge. One area of convergence is that both Information Therapy founder Don Kemper and Health 2.0’s Matthew Holt are widely recognized within the health care community as extraordinary individuals. In addition, their respective missions are aggressively “pro-consumer.” And yet, there is a disconnect.
Congratulations to David Blumenthal on being named National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT). Dr. Blumenthal will be the person most responsible for the rules and distribution of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (ARRA) nearly $20 billion allocation, referred to as HITECH, designated to support physician and hospital adoption of health information technologies that can improve care.
The job is fraught with difficulties, which Dr. Blumenthal has readily acknowledged. His recent New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Perspective, “Stimulating the Adoption of Health Information Technology,” is a concise, clear and honest appraisal of two of these challenges, namely how to interpret and act upon the key terms used in the legislation, “meaningful use” and “certified EHR technology.” Dr. Blumenthal gets to the heart of the matter by identifying the tasks on which the National Coordinator’s success will most depend, and which will foster the greatest controversy.
The country needs Dr. Blumenthal to succeed. The issues are complex and, with huge ideological and financial stakes involved, politically charged.
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