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Medicine meets Wiki

Jul 24, 2008• 2

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn

There’s a new wiki in the health social media town, Medpedia.

Among the most popular online sources for health information is Wikipedia. Millions of people search Wikipedia daily for insights into medical conditions, drugs, and procedures. Medpedia estimates it will cover information on at least 30,000 conditions/diseases and 10,000 drugs.

Now comes the announcement of a sharply-focused wiki from the most credible of academic health institutions: Harvard, Michigan (my alma mater), Stanford, UC-Berkeley, and a host of other highly-branded health associations and stakeholders including the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA.

Sharing more than they intended — future doctors on Facebook

Jul 24, 2008• 7

By Sarah Arnquist

The Facebook/MySpace generation is now graduating from medical school, and their
profiles along with much embarrassing personal information has been indexed in cyberworld for many to see.

The Associated Press wrote an interesting story about how researchers from the University of Florida combed through the social web sites and found embarrassing pictures of future doctors “grabbing their breasts and crotches or posing with a dead animal. They also found many photos of students drinking heavily.”

About half of the medical students they looked at had Facebook pages but only 37 percent of those limited viewership.

Clearly, the take-home message is to refrain from putting things you wouldn’t want your mother to see on your profile and to restrict who can see your profile.

Still, the info is out there. Perhaps, doctor rating sites could incorporate this readily accessible information onto their physician profiles. That would be scary.

Communication 101: Shedding power imbalances to protect patients

Jul 24, 2008• 2

By Katie Fiebelkorn Westman

Katie Fiebelkorn Westman is a registered nurse at an acute care hospital in the Minnesota Twin Cities. She is working toward a clinical nurse specialist degree, focusing on improving patient care quality.

The Joint Commission’s recent sentinel event alert on the detrimental affects of ineffective communication between caregivers prompted me to examine the communication I see daily in the hospital.

The dearth of effective communication skills is not limited to the health care profession — we just have bigger consequences when we get things wrong. Someone in another profession may run a report incorrectly and be annoyed to have to redo it, but in health care, we can take off the wrong body part, give the wrong medicine, or send someone home with the wrong discharge instructions.

These mistakes are big deals. We need, as healthcare providers, to respect each other, our different points of view, and learn how to talk.

California kids may face triple whammy, leading to more uninsured

Jul 24, 2008• 4

By Sarah Arnquist

After years of seeing decreasing numbers of uninsured children, California is poised to go the other direction.

For years, child enrollment in private health insurance plans decreased as companies scaled back on health care costs by increasing employees’ share of the premiums or by stopping dependent coverage altogether.

But those declines were offset by increased enrollment in public programs. Recognizing that half the uninsured children already qualified for Medi-Cal (California’s version of Medicaid), and Healthy families (the
state’s SCHIP program), school districts and advocates focused efforts on finding and enrolling those children.

But now, things aren’t looking so rosy. State and county budgets constraints threaten to erode the children’s enrollment gains in
Medi-Cal, Healthy Families and Healthy
Kids programs, county-organized health plans.

"Come next spring, you could have a double or triple whammy of kids
losing health coverage," said Joel Diringer, a consultant who helped
many California counties create the local programs.

Health Wonks unite

Jul 24, 2008

The bi-weekly review of the best from health bloggers is up over at Health Business Blog.

The math is wrong

Jul 24, 2008• 4

By Paul Levy

I have great respect for Jim Stergios and the Pioneer Institute he heads. The Institute has been an important force in Massachusetts public policy debates for many years. But I think Jim has the wrong policy prescription in an op-ed published in the Boston Globe.

Citing the higher than expected costs of the Massachusetts Healthcare Reform Act of 2006, Jim proposes that there should be a reduction in payment to Boston Medical Center and Cambridge Health Alliance, the two largest hospital providers of care to the poor in the Boston metropolitan region. To be fair, Jim is not the first to propose this. Over the years, there have been periodic attacks on BMC and CHA for their special payments. Several years ago, for example, many of the community hospitals complained that they were subsidizing these urban safety net facilities.

Beyond ignoring the history of these hospitals in our city and the special role they play in the health care system, Jim’s proposal puts the focus of the financial problem in the wrong place.

CCR Symposium: Current and Future Uses for Health Data Exchange

Jul 24, 2008• 1

The Massachusetts Medical Society will hold a symposium next month called the "Current and Future Uses for Health Data Exchange." Adam Bosworth, former VP of Google Health and CEO of his new start-up, Keas, Inc., will be the keynote speaker.

The Sept. 13 symposium is intended for a non-technical audience of providers, administrators, and standards professionals who have an interest in the exchange of networked personal health data and information.

The all-day event near Boston costs $125, whcih includes breakfast and lunch. Seating is limited to under 200 due to the size of the amphitheater. For more information visit the Medical society’s Website.

Obama health plan, silliness

Jul 23, 2008• 16

By Matthew Holt

Enter David Cutler. Result is more silly meaningless numbers

<sigh>

It is truly worrying when the single most sensible quote in the whole damn article comes from AEI’s Joe Antos.

How is this worth the NY Times’ attention? And what happens when the Obama bill comes up in Congress and somehow there isn’t a $2,500 check to be mailed to each household?

I thought this guy was going to treat us like grown-ups. After 8 years of insanity that would be nice.

If Cutler, who doesn’t exactly strike me as a major league populist, thinks that Obama has to “find a way to talk to people in a way they understand” how about he steers him to talk more about some insurance reforms that are both possible and very understandable. Like stopping this.

Cost containment is the missing link in Obama’s health plan

Jul 23, 2008• 2

By Robert Laszewski

Barack Obama’s health care plan follows the Democratic template—an emphasis on dramatically and quickly increasing the number of people who have health insurance by spending significant money upfront.

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The Obama campaign estimates his health care reform plan will cost between $50 and $65 billion a year when fully phased in. He assumes that it will be paid from savings in the system and from discontinuing the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year.

That the Obama health care reform plan would cost between $50 and $65 billion a year is highly doubtful. Obama claimed his plan was nearly identical to Hillary Clinton’s and her plan was projected by her to cost more than $100 billion a year.

Doubtful McCain’s health plan would accomplish any real cost savings

Jul 23, 2008• 3

By Robert Laszewski

John McCain is now the presumptive Republican nominee for president. As a result, what he thinks about health care policy will be out front in the presidential campaign this fall.

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McCain’s thinking couldn’t be more different from Democrat Barack Obama.McCain very rightly points to health care costs as the biggest health care issue. "We are approaching a ‘perfect storm’ of problems that if not addressed by the next president will cause our health care system to implode," he has said.

Therefore, his focus is on the health care costs that make health insurance so expensive that many individuals can’t afford it for themselves, employers can’t afford to provide it to their employees, and government can’t afford a wider safety net for the poor and long-term solvency for senior benefits.

He also reminds us that costs can’t be improved without dealing with quality in tandem.