Most Americans -- myself included -- think we live in the greatest country on earth. After all, we have the biggest economy, the most powerful military, the most pervasive popular culture, and, of course, the American Dream. We've got Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Walmart and Amazon, Hollywood and Nashville. We have -- well, we used to have -- the biggest city, the tallest building, and the largest manufacturing output. But when it comes to some of the basics, we're not doing so well. Take health care, for example. If you listen to politicians, we have the best health care in the world. And, indeed, if you have enough money (or really good insurance), happen to live in the right zip code, and manage to stumble upon the right doctors/hospitals, that's true. You can get the best health care in the world here. But fail any one of those qualifiers, maybe not...
health outcomes
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"What Systems Work In Healthcare And Why?" Is Focus Of 19th Annual Health Policy Conference
Today’s healthcare systems face escalating challenges as they aggregate into larger and more complex health systems that are vertically and horizontally integrated. The trend is being driven by both business conditions and new government policies. But are the new systems producing better clinical and business outcomes? Read More »
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5 Trends Will Reshape Health IT In 2013
Ultimately the goal of all healthcare--IT included--is to put itself out of business. That may sound a bit strange but medicine's primary objective is to cure disease, or prevent it from occurring in the first place. And as the profession gets better at these two tasks, the public should become increasingly self-sufficient and have less and less need for its services. Read More »
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A Marriage Of Data And Caregivers Gives Dr. Atul Gawande Hope For Health Care
Dr. Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) has been a bard in the health care world, straddling medicine, academia and the humanities as a practicing surgeon, medical school professor, best-selling author and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. His long-form narratives and books have helped illuminate complex systems and wicked problems to a broad audience. Read More »
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America's Dismal International Rankings - Time to Innovate Our Way Out of Our Messes
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Crowdfunding Healthcare Innovation: Q & A With Alex Fair, CEO Of MedStartr
In this ICH Blog post, we spotlight MedStartr, a new health-related crowdfunding platform. Crowdfunding for health-related projects is an innovative idea that enables the consumer to decide what health information technology applications or devices are important and ready to come on the market. Read More »
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Doctors’ reminders help keep people more engaged in their health care
A study led by Dr. John Mafi, a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, has found that a simple note from a primary care doctor can be a critical way to keep patients involved in their own health care. The research, published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, examined a growing national program that provides patients with easy online access to their doctors’ notes about their appointments. The program, OpenNotes, began in 2010, when 105 primary care physicians invited nearly 14,000 of their patients to view their electronic notes about their clinic visits. The initiative was intended to better engage patients in their own care and improve communication between patients and their doctors.
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Flawed Health IT: Whose Fault Is It?
We spent National Health IT Week peeking through the eyes of others at possible health IT futures. So we'll start this week with the views of someone who points to a radically different future for health IT in large part by claiming that current health IT options are pretty miserable. Read More »
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Headline Sponsors Harris Healthcare To Show How To Achieve Better Outcomes Through Value-Based Healthcare
Headline sponsors Harris Healthcare, will highlight the critical role of technology in providing value-based healthcare at this year's Healthcare Efficiency Through Technology EXPO at Olympia, London. Read More »
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Health Care's Crushing Lack Of Competition
No matter how it resolves, the fiercely partisan debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act will not solve America’s true health care crisis. Indeed, a key reason why expanding coverage is so hard is that health care services cost so much, making insurance premiums unaffordable to many. Driven by lack of competition, ever higher prices are being paid to hospitals, doctors and insurers without leading to better outcomes. It’s time to implement a competition policy for health care before Americans crumple under a system that is devouring family and government budgets...
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Healthcare: We Get What We Pay For
Politico (Dan Diamond) had two great pieces last week -- one on how tax-exempt hospitals benefited from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) while cutting charity care, and the second on how the Cleveland Clinic has built an island of prosperity amidst an impoverished community. I'd like to say I'm surprised, but I'm not. I wrote about the supposed community benefits of "non-profit" hospitals two years ago, and Politico's analysis suggests things are getting worse. They looked at the top seven hospitals, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, and found...
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HHS Seeks to Reorient Obamacare Innovation Center
Even as the Trump administration works to repeal the Affordable Care Act, it is taking advantage of one of the 2010 law's provisions to advance its own take on health system innovation. Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on Sept. 20 announced plans to redirect the six-year-old Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation within the Health and Human Services Department. Its mission is to test new approaches or models to pay for and deliver high-quality health care more efficiently...
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How the Right Data Analytics Diminish Administrative Burden on Clinicians
Data flooding the healthcare industry has the potential to completely revolutionize patient care and drive improved health outcomes. Yet when left inadequately structured or under-automated, the deluge of data is one contributing factor to administrative burden — a pervasive issue affecting clinicians across most specialties. Eighty percent of physicians today are professionally overextended or at capacity, leaving them with no time to see additional patients, according to the 2016 Physicians Foundation survey...
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Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients
Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care? Read More »
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National Health IT Week: Celebrating HIT As An Essential Tool
Just as a carpenter finishes his work by making sure that his hammers, chisels and saws are clean, sharp and ready for the next project, so should we take pride in and look after our health IT tools and systems. In essence, that’s what we’re doing at this moment, as the health IT community convenes in Washington, DC, for National Health IT Week. Read More »
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NHS Hack Weekend - Geeks Who Love The NHS
NHS Hack weekends are driven by Ross Jones and Dr Carl Jones, collectively known as Open Health Care, both committed to producing high quality software that improves health outcomes. Borne out of a similar extremely successful event in London, these hack days bring together software developers and coders with doctors, health care leaders and practitioners to create disruptive solutions to problems in healthcare services. Read More »
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