The reaction in certain quarters to the healthcare reform provisions of the stimulus bill now clearing
Congress lays bare the nature of opposition to the forthcoming fight for real change in healthcare: It will be viciousness at the top of the lungs. It will be a scorched-earth campaign. Its main weapon will be fear. It will be unencumbered by any actual knowledge, subtlety, awareness of history, or access to the thoughts of people who actually know what they are talking about. Its fury will be unloaded not just in service of narrow and inflexible political nostrums, but in the service of sectors of the industry which fear that a truly efficient and effective healthcare system would cripple their profit margins.
Above the Fold
Just OK Quality or “The Best”?
The folks at the Oklahoma Hospital Association might want to get together with the Commonwealth Fund to see if they can borrow a URL for their hospital quality Web site.
Using the two-letter abbreviation for the state name, the Oklahoma association’s just-launched site providing quality and safety information on 80 local hospitals promises “OKHospitalQuality.” On the other hand, the Commonwealth Fund’s almost-as-new site displaying quality information on hospitals nationwide boldly asks “WhyNotTheBest?”
In both cases, however, visitors will largely see repackaged HospitalCompare measures from CMS and the standardized H-CAHPS patient satisfaction survey from AHRQ. The Oklahoma association claims its site is easier to use than that of CMS, and they’re right. For instance, it’s simple to look at state benchmarks and multiple hospitals at the same time.
Massachusetts doctors say single-payer or bust
Massachusetts members of the Physicians for a National Health Program released a report today faulting the state’s experiment with health reform for failing to achieve universal coverage, being too expensive and draining funds away from safety-net providers.
The doctors’ punch line is that the reform has given private insurance companies more business and power without eliminating vast administrative waste. In fact, it says, the “Connector” in charge of administering the reform adds about 5 percent more in administrative expenses.
In summary, nothing less than single-payer national health reform will work, according to authors Drs. Rachel Nardin, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, all professors at Harvard Medical School.
Job Post: Causality Inc.
We are seeking a full-time partner/investor to build a new company that
dramatically improves the way millions of patients learn and shop
online. We address a $70 billion market. Our current team consists of seasoned entrepreneurs, technologists and physicians from Google (Teams: Health, Search & Foundation), Stanford Graduate School of Business, UCSF Medical School and former high-ranking government officials from CDC/HHS. As a founding CTO, will initially assist with VC presentations, partner meetings, technical collateral creation and overall technical direction. With funding, you will hire the engineering team. If you are an investor, we currently accrue consistent technical progress and have our first hires (and other investors) on standby.
CASTING CALL: The Future Role of the Doctor
Health 2.0 is working on a new documentary focusing on the next generation of physicians and healthcare professionals.
We
are looking to cast 3-5 medical students who are willing to share their
perspectives on how the field of medicine is changing, how they expect
to be practicing when they're out in the world, and how Health 2.0
technologies factor into their lives.
Are you (or can you
recommend) a dynamic and engaging medical student or health
professional in training who is currently working to bring the medical
profession/healthcare system into the 21st century? Are you working on
projects that relate to social media/the web/mobile/ changing the world
with technology? Then we want to talk to you!
The short film
will debut at the Health 2.0 conference in Boston in April and be
distributed online through various partner organizations.
Please send all recommendations and references to Lizzie Dunklee, Executive
Producer at Health 2.0 at li****@********on.com.
Podcast: Blues VC fund invests in Phreesia
I’ve been following Phreesia since it was two guys in an apartment trying to figure out how to make the patient check-in at the doctors office a better and more useful experience. Today they announced an $11m series C round with new investor BCBS Ventures, a new-ish fund backed by 11 Blues plans. (FD: Phreesia has presented and exhibited at Health 2.0, and I think they’re a great example of using light-weight web technology to solve a messy process problem.) I spoke to Chaim Indig, CEO & President of Phreesia, and new investor Paul Brown, Managing Director of BCBS Ventures Inc this morning. Here’s the interview.
Calendar: The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009
The Transforming Healthcare Summit 2009: Impact & Opportunity in the Obama Plan, Thu. Feb. 26, 2009, 5:45 pm in Boston with Keynote Jim Roosevelt of Tufts and the Obama Transition Team and panelists Jim Glaser of Partners, Jonathan Bush of athenahealth, and Charlie Baker of Harvard Pilgrim.
The American healthcare sector has never experienced such a time of crisis, uncertainty, and opportunity. As a result, the Obama Administration has made healthcare the centerpiece of its stimulus and reform plans. Billions of dollars are flowing into healthcare from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and tens of billions more are expected from the American Recovery and Reinvestment (Stimulus) Plan and from the forthcoming comprehensive healthcare reform plan. But how do you and your organization learn about the change and get ahead of it?
An Interview with Lynn Jennings, CEO of WeCare TLC, an Onsite Clinic Company
The
American entrepreneurial economy distinctly differs from that of
socialistic European economies. American organizations must be able to
make decisions based on proximity to performance, the market,
technology, society, environment, and demographics. In Europe, on the
other hand, distance from the market of centralized systems makes
innovation and responsiveness difficult"Innovation-Driven Health Care: 34 Key Concepts for Transformation" — Jones and Bartlett, 2007
Background
Q: What is your position?
A: I am CEO of Alliance Underwriters. It has two subsidiaries. One is called Medwatch. The other is called WeCareTLC. Alliance Underwriters
is a Managing General Underwriter for stop-lost insurance for
self-funded employers on their health insurance. We have been in
business for over 20 years. Medwatch is a utilization management company doing case management and disease management. It has been in business over 20 years. WeCareTLC
is an on-site employer clinical management company, and it has been in
business about three years. In these three companies, we have a total
of about 100 employees, and our fee revenues are about $8 million. We
are located in Orlando, Florida.
Checklists (The Sequel)
Last month’s New England Journal included another astounding checklist study,
an international extravaganza that found nearly 50% reductions in
mortality and complications after implementation of pre- and post-op
surgical safety checklists.
Wow.
Coincidentally, I read the study, conducted by a research team led by surgeon/author extraordinaire Atul Gawande,
on my way home from a meeting at the headquarters of the Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The AHRQ gathering brought
together the advisors to a new rollout of the Hopkins/Michigan
checklist program to prevent central line-associated bloodstream
infections (CABSI) to 10 additional states. You remember that study, published in the NEJM in 2007: implementation of a simple 5-item checklist in more than 100 Michigan ICUs led to over 1000 lives saved.
Commentology
MToubbeh, MD wrote us in response to Eric Novack's slightly incendiary post. ("The Expansion of the Federal Healthcare Bureaucracy Bill")
I don't think that when we built the Highway system
in the country that people were worried that the Government was going
to control the flow of travel. The ONC was established under the Bush administration, is headed up by
a provider and the new advisory board (NeHC) has at least 8 physicians
on it including many who post on this blog regularly.
This
bill in fact has blocked the power of many lobbying groups (ie it isn't
a vendor dominated organization) and is only one small part of the
total amount of money that needs to be implemented in health IT. The
private sector has been catering to their clients (hospitals) and both
providers and consumers have been left out of this process up until
now.
Bev MD had this comment on David Kibbe's landmark post on Clinical Groupware:
"As
a former medical laboratory and blood bank director, I have seen every
conceivable(and some inconceivable) way that a patient's identity can
be mistaken and incorrect information entered in a patient record. This
is one reason why every blood bank will re-draw a patient's blood on
every admission to confirm their blood type is really the same as what
is in their record. And no, one cannot rely on the patient himself to
verify the information, for a variety of reasons. Please do not
overlook the critical necessity for at least one, preferably two,
unique patient identifiers in any type of system that is developed – or
you may literally kill someone."
