Ezra Klein
See the following -
Healthcare's Biggest Lie: Employers Can't Do Anything About Massive Pricing Failure
Astute observers have stated controlling healthcare costs is almost impossible. TIME magazine devoted their longest story in their history to this topic in The Bitter Pill by Steven Brill that was turned into a book. The solution to the problem that is outlined below addresses the massive pricing failure present in healthcare. That is, in most markets higher prices equates to higher quality. In healthcare, frequently the opposite is true. For example, it stands to reason that surgeons who do a procedure frequently are far more efficient and have far fewer complications than those who perform surgeries more infrequently...
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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
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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.
Obama’s Surprising Answer on Which Part of Obamacare Has Disappointed Him the Most
There was this moment, about 50 minutes into our interview with President Barack Obama last week, that genuinely surprised me (and surprised other health care journalists, like David Nather, too). My colleague Ezra Klein had asked the president a question about which part of the law had overperformed his expectations, and which part of the law had underperformed. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of something his administration has tried, and failed, to do: Get doctors off paper and on to digital medical records...
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The Right Way to Modernize VA's VistA EHR: Shift Development to the Private Sector and the Cloud
While changes to VistA are warranted and necessary, trashing the entire system because one component may be flawed makes little sense from technological or financial perspectives. The VA scheduling scandal was the product of an agency overwhelmed by veterans returning from two theaters of war. In that scenario, the scheduling system became a scapegoat for organizational and human resources challenges that were bound to manifest in one way or another.The VA should not heed calls to replace VistA for these key reasons...
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Veterans aren’t the only ones waiting for health care
But the big question with these stories about the VA is, "compared to what?" This scandal wouldn't exist if the VA didn't have performance metrics on its employees. If it didn't measure or care whether veterans get prompt appointments it could just do what the rest of the health-care system has done and not hold people responsible for these metrics. Read More »
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Why Didn't The White House Use WordPress?
HealthCare.gov is "a disaster," "a failure" and "excruciatingly embarrassing" for the Obama administration. Why didn't they just use WordPress? Read More »
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