Complaining about health care prices is nothing new. The medical component of CPI has been higher than the overall CPI for decades. As far back as 1989 Gerry Anderson and colleagues showed "It's the Prices, Stupid" that explained why our national spending was so high compared to other countries. More recently, Elizabeth Rosenthal detailed those prices in an series of reports in The New York Times. She recently followed those up with her incisive book An American Sickness. Dr. Rosenthal also illustrated some of the clever techniques used to wring the most money out of our pockets, such as the upcoding industry and tacking facility fees onto visits. As the saying goes, if you're sitting at a poker table and you can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you.
affordability
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Kangaroos, Insurance Companies, and the Rising Cost of Healthcare
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Medsphere Systems and ChartLogic Merge
Medsphere Systems Corporation and ChartLogic, Inc., today announced that they have executed a definitive agreement to merge the two companies. The transaction will expand Medsphere’s existing enterprise healthcare IT products and services to include ChartLogic’s proven ambulatory electronic health record (EHR), practice management and medical billing solutions. ChartLogic will retain its name and operate as a division of Medsphere; the expanded company will offer integrated delivery networks and physician practices an affordable and interoperable choice that meets the clinical needs of providers across the spectrum of care...
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Millennials Are (Not) So Different
Millennials get a bad rap. If we believe conventional wisdom about them, they like to live with their parents, at least until they can move into their urban-center condo. They hate to drive. They're maddening in the workplace, demanding lots of frills and constant praise yet returning little loyalty. They're hyperconnected through their various digital devices. And, when they deign to think about health care, which isn't often, they want all digital, all the time. There's some truth to the conventional wisdom, but not as much as you'd think. A new study from Credit Karma flatly asserts that "everything you thought you knew about Millennials may be wrong," finding that they still have aspirations to much of the same "American Dream" as previous generations...
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On the Importance of Health Information Technology in Developing Areas
Health Information Technology (Health IT) is a broad term that describes the technology and infrastructure used to record, analyze, and share patient health data. Various technologies include health record systems, including personal, paper, and electronic; personal health tools including smart devices and apps; and finally, communities to share and discuss information. Some of this technology can tell the patient whether they need to go on a diet too, and most of the time the golo diet is what they should be doing or they should be taking Gynexin pill for gynecomastia like most men should be doing...
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Open Source EHR Company Achieves 48 Percent Revenue Growth in 2016
Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of affordable and interoperable healthcare information technology (IT) solutions and services, is welcoming the new year with excitement and anticipation following a busy and historic 2016. Significant recent achievements include an expansion of company products and services as well as a record number of new clients and unprecedented revenue growth. The company’s ongoing efforts to make affordable healthcare IT more widely available have resulted in specific indicators from the previous calendar year of growth and success...
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OpenVista Goes Live in New TaraVista Behavioral Health Hospital
Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of affordable and interoperable healthcare IT platform solutions, today announced that the company’s OpenVista electronic health record (EHR) is live in TaraVista Behavioral Health Center, a new inpatient facility in Devens, Massachusetts. Originally conceived and launched by Health Partners New England (HPNE), TaraVista utilizes the creative forefront of architecture, design and medicine to exemplify the future of behavioral health care...
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Partners Makes Big Interoperability Push
Partners HealthCare is once again looking across the Charles River to Cambridge, Mass.-based InterSystems, enlisting the company to replace several existing integration engines and enable the health system to consolidate its financial and clinical technologies onto one electronic health record platform. Read More »
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Significant Threats to Patient Safety from Healthcare Provider Overload and Burnout Must be Addressed
Sepsis Alliance and the High Reliability Organization Council (HROC), two leading national advocates for patient safety, are raising the alarm on shortages in healthcare personnel, and the increase in data overload and medical provider burnout that is putting more and more patients at risk. Examples include long wait times to get appointments (which affects access to care), misdiagnoses that delay care, wrong-site surgeries, and other safety failures...
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Singapore’s Pragmatic Approach to Technology Disruptions
Conceived in 2014, Singapore’s National Health IT Masterplan is coming to fruition, with key projects such as the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) system already in place. This was revealed by Singapore’s health minister Gan Kim Yong earlier this week at the opening of the National Health IT Summit, a gathering of top medical and IT practitioners in the city-state...
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South Africa’s Areta Health Selects Medsphere Healthcare IT Solutions
Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of affordable and interoperable healthcare information technology (IT) solutions and services, today announced that the company has reached an agreement with South Africa’s Areta Health for comprehensive support of the organization’s hospital network. The contract covers Areta Health’s Specialist Day Hospital (SDH) system spread throughout South Africa. The hospitals, in turn, anchor an integrated health network with remote clinics and in-home monitoring that allow patients to heal at home without sacrificing attentive care...
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Sub-Saharan African Countries Club Together To Speed Up Mobile Rollouts, Smooth Spectrum Use
A new cross-border group will meet regularly to discuss spectrum allocation, digital inclusion and increasing the pace of high-speed mobile network deployments. Read More »
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The Four Big Reasons Why 4 Billion People Aren't Online
It's around 46 years since consumers first started to use online services, and 23 years since the NCSA Mosaic browser started to popularise the World-Wide Web. But more than half the world's population - around 4.1 billion people - are still not using the Internet, according to Facebook's 56-page State of Connectivity 2015 report. The authors note that "Over the past 10 years, connectivity increased by approximately 200 to 300 million people per year."...
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This Stanford Student’s $35 Invention Saves Lives and Won Her $150,000
Maya Varma did something at the age of seventeen that many people will never even accomplish in their lifetime—she invented a device that can save lives. Varma, now a rising sophomore at Stanford University, won the First Place Medal of Distinction for Innovation at the Intel Science Talent Search in 2016 for designing an inexpensive pulmonary function analyzer for the diagnosis of five pulmonary illnesses. Unlike the typical devices that hospitals use to diagnose lung diseases, Varma’s invention is exceedingly affordable, with the necessary materials costing a measly $35...
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University System of Maryland Awards Mini-Grants to Increase the Use of Open Educational Resources
The University System of Maryland’s (USM) William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation announced 21 grantees who will receive support to adopt, adapt and scale the use of open educational resources (OER) through the Maryland Open Source Textbook (MOST) initiative High-impact OER Mini-Grant Program. The grants will be provided to faculty who are adopting, adapting or scaling the use of OER in Fall 2017 through high-enrollment courses where quality OER exists.
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Using 3D Printers to Tackle Gaza's Medical Shortages
The stethoscope, a staple device in modern medicine, is a luxury item in Gaza. At Gaza's largest hospital, al-Shifa, there are only one or two stethoscopes in each department; doctors left without one resort to pressing their ears against patients' chests to diagnose an illness. "That would be the best-case scenario," Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani told Al Jazeera. "If someone's full of blood, most doctors aren't going to put their ears to the chest. So, doctors are making decisions without that piece of information."...
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