Experts often compare how slowly the health care system is "reforming" to how hard it is to turn a battleship. They're so big that they can't turn on a dime (much less on $3 trillion!), and there is as much risk in trying to oversteer as in not turning at all. Things are changing, we're assured, but it will take time to get on the desired new course. Maybe. But maybe it is time to jump off the obsolete battleship onto something more nimble. Some call it Do-It-Yourself Health (there are both .org and .com sites devoted to the topic, among others). PwC declared it to be one of the top ten trends of 2015. Dave Chase believes that "DIY health reform is now leading the way for the highest performing reform" -- not Medicare, health insurers, not even employers...
Dave Chase
See the following -
DIY Health to the Rescue
- Login to post comments
Do We Really Need More Doctors? How About Trying to Have Healthier Folks?
Health care needs a better business model. HHS reports that U.S. health care spending will surpass $10,000 per person this year, will grow almost 6% annually for the foreseeable future, and will consume over 20% of GDP by 2025. About half of our spending goes for labor costs, with health care employment remaining one of the "bright spots" in our economy. Indeed, health care jobs continued to soar even when the economy tanked in our most recent recession. Despite that steady growth, we continue to talk about a physician shortage, especially for primary care. Medical school enrollment is at new highs, yet it is not projected to dent the demand...
- Login to post comments
Episode #15: Medstartr Takes Crowdfunding To A Whole New Level
This week on HealthSparx, I am joined by healthcare guru Alex Fair, Co-Founder and CEO of Medstartr and Chapter Lead for Health 2.0 NYC, to chat about his journey from mad scientist to serial entrepreneur... Read More »
- Login to post comments
Experience Design In Health Care: A New Imperative
Patient engagement is a potent therapeutic, but how is engagement related to a core tenet of healthcare’s Triple Aim: Patient experience? For that, let’s take a quick look at user experience (UX) design in software. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Have PPO Networks Perpetrated The Greatest Heist In American History?
The Washington Post and Vox have done excellent reporting that shows U.S. spends so much more than other countries for one simple reason — price. The good news is that some have found the solution to severe pricing failure, however so few have that the Middle Class is in a 20-year long economic depression that is at least 95% due to healthcare. As we’ve delved into the issues putting together the story for The Big Heist film, it is clear that the explanation for the strangest presidential election in my lifetime has been badly misreported. At most, immigration and globalization account for 5% of wage stagnation (on the latter, a big reason for jobs moving overseas are healthcare costs). In other words, a minuscule portion of the wage stagnation is due to foreign countries.
- Login to post comments
Hospital CEOs Behaving Badly And The Devastating Consequences On The Middle Class
When big health insurers propose mergers, it makes for good antitrust enforcement theater to try to block them. However, if government officials want to address anti-competitive activities that have a dramatically bigger impact, they should shift their focus to local market provider M&A activity that consistently show prices increase after the deal is done. However, the most rapacious, anti-competitive practices I’ve seen in my entire career have come from hospitals–frequently from tax-exempt “nonprofits” that would make John D. Rockefeller blush with their brutal actions. The combined impact has created a middle class economic depression that has driven populist presidential campaign success, which was highlighted in a recently released Brookings study.
- Login to post comments
Is Shkreli the Exception, or the Norm, in Big Pharma?
I didn't want to write about pharmaceutical companies. They get enough bad press, and adding to it almost seems like piling on. If Valeant is the poster company for outrage about drug pricing, it's less because what they are doing is unusual than it is because we suspect they are the norm. Honestly, I wanted to discuss McDonald's turning their Happy Meals boxes into VR headsets --I'm not making that up -- but, gosh darn it, it's almost like the pharmaceutical companies are daring me to talk about them. So I will.
- Login to post comments
Is The 1.5+ Trillion Dollar HITECH Act a Failure?
Hopefully, the public statements made by President Obama and Vice President Biden will lead to a public debate over the monumental problems that the HITECH Act and proprietary EHR vendors have caused the American people. While the press continues to report the figure of $35 billion as the cost of implementing EHRs, that figure does not tell the entire story. Perhaps the next step is to provide accountability and transparency. That would start with firm numbers regarding the real costs of EHR implementations forced on an unprepared healthcare system by the HITECH Act.
- The Future Is Open
- Login to post comments
MedStartr Brings Dedicated Crowdfunding Platform To Digital Health
NYC-based MedStartr (@medstartr) has finally unveiled version 1.0 of their crowd funding platform for digital health and medicine projects, which are specifically ineligible for listing on Kickstarter. Read More »
- Login to post comments
Monopolies On Medical Knowledge And Information Are Unethical
First, let’s acknowledge what we’re not talking about: holding onto knowledge derived from an organization’s years of hard work and learning to outperform the competition. Let’s all agree that protecting one’s secret sauce is critical to compete fiercely and win in the open market...The thing is that sharing information related to patient care is an inherent responsibility if you’re in healthcare–it runs parallel to accepting the Hippocratic Oath. But sharing alone isn’t enough; the responsibility extends to delivering consumable, usable information universally to the point of care. Ask anyone who has ever received a 1,900-page CCDA on a patient. It may very well be compliant, but it’s also absolutely useless.
- Login to post comments
Obama and Biden Blast EHR Vendors for Data Blocking
As they are winding their terms in office, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden dropped a stink bomb on the health IT industry. Speaking at different events on Friday, January 9th, the President and Vice President both criticized proprietary electronic health record (EHR) vendors as the primary obstacle to the success of their administration’s health care strategy. This is the highest level acknowledgment so far of the serious impact that “lock-in” EHR software vendors are having on America’s medical infrastructure and the ability of physicians to provide medical care.
Seattle’s Health Innovators of the Year: Industry Group Recognizes 7 Leaders in the Field
Washington’s life sciences industry has a habit of flying under the radar, despite the innovative and impactful work being done in labs and clinics around the state every day. But once a year, the Seattle Health Innovation Forum brings this work to the top by recognizing local leaders in health innovation, from researchers to startup mentors to those changing the way we communicate about health. The 2016 Health Innovator of the Year awardees include Ingrid Swanson Pultz, a senior research fellow at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design and the Chief Scientific Officer at PvP Biologics. She received the Imagination Award, which recognizes imaginative problem-solving in the health sciences...
- Login to post comments
Strapped For Funding, Medical Researchers Pitch To The Crowd
In April, Dyer turned to Medstartr, one of several new crowd-funding websites tailored for scientific research and the healthcare sector. Medstartr, which debuted online in July, focuses on helping biomedical start-ups solicit small donations from everyday citizens. Meanwhile, Petridish, which came online 6 March, and iAMscientist, on 31 July, are helping scientists affiliated with academic or nonprofit institutions raise money for their research.
- Login to post comments
Taking Lessons from the Open Source Movement & Craft Brewers, Doctor Revolutionizing Healthcare
Pioneering doctors are showing the way to a much higher performing system as I highlighted in Doctors' Declaration of Independence. They understand that every example of great societal movements to our toughest challenges have come from the bottom up. The fundamental structure of politics is to cement the status quo. If the status quo was performing well that would be OK, but it's clearly failing miserably. In fact, Chapter 1 of my new book is "America Has Gone to War for Less" (link to free copy of the book below) referring to the collateral damage from this wildly underperforming status quo. Fortunately, doctors are collaborating to change this such as the Direct Primary Care conference starting today in Orlando.
- Login to post comments
The Annual Health Benefits Kabuki Dance Has Created the Greatest Heist in American History
The data is clear that the middle class is in an economic depression because of looks like a breach of fiduciary duty by their employers. This has created the strangest election in my lifetime -- look no further than 1930s Germany to see the effects of sustained economic duress on a citizenry. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders represent the primal screams of the American middle class that is at least 95% driven by healthcare's unnecessary and easily avoided hyperinflation. It's stupefying how companies that will rigorously check whether there's a receipt for a $58 dinner an employee reported, will blindly squander millions unnecessarily on healthcare.
- Login to post comments