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Health care information technology in an early Obama Administration

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By John HalamkaHalamka

When Obama takes office in January, the economy will be his first
priority, followed by the war in Iraq. Health care will follow as his
next major issue to address.

What will he do?

I imagine
he’ll take a phased approach to ensuring all Americans have access to
health care. Given the change management needed to accomplish this, it
will take a while.

However, Health care Information Technology
has broad bipartisan support and is his best strategy to reduce
health care costs, reimburse providers for quality instead of quantity,
and to ensure coordination of care. Here are my predictions for
health care IT in the first year of the Obama administration:

Continue reading…

At Kaiser, “The EMR is the Foundation of Everything We Do”

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By Scott ShreeveScott_shreeve_2

Continuing his series of interviews about the business care for Health 2.0, here Scott Shreeve interviews Anna-Lisa Silvestre, the VP of Online Services for Kaiser Permanente.

SS: Anna-Lisa, nice to meet you. Tell me a little about your background?

AL: I started out with Kaiser Permanente 23 years
ago as a health educator. I was fortunate to be able to transition into
the interactive technology unit that was created in the mid 1990’s. We
had a singular focus on developing online capabilities back in the good
old HTML days. However, things have dramatically changed since then and
we now have over 2.5M members who have activated an online account; 60%
of those users signed on two or more times last year.

Continue reading…

Daniel Palestrant, CEO, Sermo at Health 2.0

By Matthew Holt

Sermo has very quickly become the big Kahuna in the physician social network space. So big in fact that its rivals trumpet how different they are from it in their models and approach. Yet it was only two years ago that Sermo was still putting a little votive candle in a net for every doctor who signed up—and the major problem it was facing was corralling the packs of dogs charging around its office in a basement in Cambridge, MA. A lot has happened in under two years, but I understand animal control is still a major function! So we thought that having Daniel Palestrant tell us where Sermo is now would be a great way to kick off day two at Health 2.0 and to talk about the new deal with Bloomberg. (The net broke at around 12,000 candles I believe, and no dogs were mentioned in the making of this video, sadly!)

Now, a real bipartisan opportunity in health care exists

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By Robert LaszewskiLaszewski

President-Elect Obama, and about every candidate for Congress, has said he wants to change the partisan tone in Washington. Obama, the Democratic Congressional leadership, and the Republicans have a terrific opportunity to do just that on health care when they all come to Washington early next year.

As I posted earlier, I do not believe there is any chance we can see the enactment of the comprehensive Obama health plan in the near term.

But there are a number of important steps that can be taken next year and each of them have enjoyed strong bipartisan support during the past year:

Continue reading…

Health in an Obama world — what we know so far

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By Jane Sarasohn-KahnObama

We know the name of the 44th President of the United States: Barack Obama. As the next President’s supporter Oprah Winfrey is known to ask, "What do you know for sure?" When it comes to health, there are a few things we know about a President Obama.

First and foremost, addressing challenges in U.S. health care will require a multi-pronged strategy which brings stakeholders together. The key health-aches to address will be:

  • Covering the uninsured
  • Stemming rising health care costs
  • Wiring the health information infrastructure and getting electronic health records into medical practice
  • Funding what works, and de-funding what doesn’t
  • Ensuring an innovative health discovery and commercialization environment.

This is not a one-man job, and Senator Obama knows that. He has surrounded himself with a cadre of experts who understand these Big Hairy Health Issues and are on the forefront of solutions. He has, thus far, made smart choices in his campaign staff and advisers. This is the concept known as "judgement."

Continue reading…

Going Green In Health Care…

By CHARLIE BAKERI’m pretty sure that most public policy types believe they are doing
the right kinds of things to encourage a greener and more resource
sustainable economy.  And in many cases, I’m sure that translates into
a set of initiatives, laws and regulations that put the arm on private
sector organizations to do “better.”  I was thinking about this
yesterday as I was looking at the massive, paper, perfect
bound provider directories Harvard Pilgrim is required by MA state law
to produce.

I then started to think about all the paper we are required to
produce under various state and federal statutes and regulations, and
all the mailings and letters we are required to send out to various
constituents – providers, employers, members – under other state and
federal statutes.  I took a picture a couple of years ago of the amount
of paperwork – it covered a monstrous board room-like table in a very
large conference room – that the state of Massachusetts required us to
file to maintain our license to sell insurance in Massachusetts.  I
remember thinking then, “what a waste.”

Continue reading…

METRICS: Web 2.0 technologies penetrating marketplace

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“Social media is changing the way that consumers gather health
information from the Internet. Patients and caregivers are no longer
limited to static resources but are now sharing advice and treatment
experiences online,” explained Meredith Abreu Ressi, Manhattan Research Vice
President of Research, “And it’s not just younger audiences connecting
online – consumers with conditions such as cancer, fibromyalgia, and
depression are also avid users of these types of resources. Health 2.0
is happening, and it’s changing the way things are done in the
healthcare industry.”

Manhattan Research estimates that 60 million U.S. adults are Health 2.0 consumers, using "blogs, online support groups, prescription rating sites and other health-related social media applications." The company’s Cybercitizen 0.8 report came out this week in the aftermath of the Health 2.0 in San Francisco. Ressi shares her reaction to the conference and talks about trends in online advertising and consumer behavior in the Web 2.0 era in a Manhattan Research podcast.  PODCAST 

The next president’s health agenda

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By Merrill Goozner

Note: This post first appeared at Goozner’s blog, Gooznews.

Picture_4A year ago, health care held a solid lead in the polls as the number
one concern of the American people. But by the time the Iowa caucuses
closed, and Barack Obama surged to his unexpected win, it had been
supplanted by the economy, a changing reality I noted in this New Year’s Day post.

As my daughter and I stood in a crowd of well over 100,000 people
last night in Manassas, Virginia, and heard the Democratic nominee give
his stump speech for the last time, I was struck by how little of it
was devoted to any issue beyond the core economy. His mom’s struggle
with paying her bills as she lay dying of cancer and the need to put
health into our sick care system got a line; but so did the war in Iraq
and going after bin Laden. As in 1992 when the last Democrat got
elected for the first time, it’s the economy, stupid.

But unlike some pundits who say the health care issue will be put on
the backburner for the first half of the next president first term, I
do not believe the nation will have that luxury. Curbing the growth of
health care spending will reassert itself as an issue next year because
it is key to restoring this nation to economic competitiveness.
American businesses are at a competitive disadvantage when they must
pay twice what companies in other countries pay (whether premiums or
taxes) to provide their workers health coverage.

The morning after reality for the next president is that the U.S.
spends more on health care than any other nation on earth — 16 percent
of gross domestic product and rising. Yet nearly 50 million Americans
go without health coverage during the year, and in traditional markers
of national well-being — longevity and infant mortality — the U.S.
ranks below many former Communist bloc nations of Eastern Europe.

Continue reading…

If You Have a Right to Health Care, How Much Care?

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By MAGGIE MAHAR

Hat tip to Kevin M.D. for calling my attention to “The  Covert Rationing Blog,” where Dr. Rich offers a concise summary of the dilemma we  face as we move toward a consensus that health care is not a privilege, but something that every human being should have. (One can call that a “right” or a “moral obligation that a civilized society has to provide health care to everyone.”)

The point Dr. Rich is making is that once you decide everyone deserves health care, the question is “how much care.” As he puts it:

“Exactly how much health care are you entitled to  if you have a right to health care?  Do you have a right to certain  specified health care services, to a certain dollar amount of health care per  year or per lifetime, to  whatever health care it takes to achieve perfect health, or to some other limit or non-limit?

“The question of limits (whether we should have  them or not, and what should  they be) has been a central theme of this blog and of DrRich’s book. To reiterate the fundamental problem: 1) In America we believe that it is wrong to limit health care in any way, that  everyone is entitled to the very best health care, that any bit of health care that offers even a small potential of benefit should be provided, and that death itself is merely a manifestation of insufficient research (or actionable incompetence, or systematic discrimination against the  unwealthy, or corporate greed).  2) But against that closely held belief, we must balance the unremitting law of  economics which tells us that there is simply not enough money in the known  universe to buy all the health care that might potentially offer some small  amount of benefit to every person. Health care spending has to be limited,  or it will become a fiscal black hole.”

Dr. Rich is correct on all counts. Our American love affair with medicine — and in particular, medical technology — is all  tied up with our fear of death, and a feeling  in some quarters, that “American optimism” demands that to strive for immortality. We put such emphasis on the individual, and the individual ego; how can we accept that, someday, it will be extinguished? (I’ll always remember the doctor who told me, in an interview, “Of course, one day, most people will die.” I wonder who he was  excluding from “most people”? )Continue reading…

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