I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly. In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...
Trump administration
See the following -
21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead
By John D. Halamka, MD | December 7, 2016
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Florida’s Poop Nightmare Has Come True
Emily Atkin | New Republic | September 14, 2017
In the days and hours before Hurricane Irma slammed into Florida, its residents were treated to copious media speculation about nightmare scenarios. This monster storm, journalists said, could bring a 15-foot storm surge, blow roofs off of buildings, and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage. But perhaps no scenario seemed more dire than the one Quartz warned about the day before Irma made landfall: “Hurricane Irma will likely cover South Florida with a film of poop”...
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Halamka Gears Up for HIMSS 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 15, 2017
Next week, 50,000 of our closest friends will gather together in Orlando to learn about the latest trends in the healthcare IT industry. I’ll be giving a few keynote addresses, trying to predict what the Trump administration will bring, identify those technologies that will move from hype to reality, and highlighting which products are only “compiled” in Powerpoint - a powerful development language that is really easy to modify! The Trump administration is likely to reduce regulatory burden but is unlikely to radically change the course of value-based purchasing. This means that interoperability, analytics, and workflow products that help improve outcomes while reducing costs will still be important...
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Halamka Sets Healthcare Innovation Priorities for 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | January 4, 2017
As we begin 2017, what should be the focus of our work over the next year?... Regardless of the policies, repeals, and delays of the Trump administration, we’ll still need to optimize usability and support the four goals of value-based purchasing - quality measurement, total medical expense management, practice process improvement and technology adoption. BIDMC has already created a prototype of groupware documentation and we should complete our next generation inpatient documentation solution by mid 2017. Part of that work incorporates open source secure texting as part of the medical record. We’re also piloting Google’s G-suite so that our stakeholders can store/share, collaborate, and communicate on any device from anywhere using only a browser...
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Halamka's Recommendations for Effective Care Management
By John D. Halamka, MD | January 25, 2017
I recently joined the advisory board of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions, a leading provider of analytics, decision support, and workflow enhancement services. At my first advisory board meeting there was a rich debate about the marketplace for care management and population health tools. I’ve spent years studying such solutions at HIMSS and found most of the products are “compiled in Powerpoint”, which is a very agile programming language, since it’s so easy to change…
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HHS Seeks to Reorient Obamacare Innovation Center
Charles S. Clark | Government Executive | September 26, 2017
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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Houston’s Flooding Shows What Happens When You Ignore Science and Let Developers Run Rampant
Ana Campoy and David Yanofsky | Quartz | August 29, 2017
Since Houston, Texas was founded nearly two centuries ago, Houstonians have been treating its wetlands as stinky, mosquito-infested blots in need of drainage.
Even after it became a widely accepted scientific fact that wetlands can soak up large amounts of flood water, the city continued to pave over them. The watershed of the White Oak Bayou river, which includes much of northwest Houston, is a case in point. From 1992 to 2010, this area lost more than 70% of its wetlands, according to research (pdf) by Texas A&M University...
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How VA Reform Turned Into a Fight Over Privatization
Russell Burman | The Atlantic | July 17, 2017
In 2014, the Department of Veterans Affairs was mired in a scandal. An inspector general’s report had found “systemic” manipulation by government officials to hide lengthy and growing wait times at its medical centers. Veterans were waiting months for appointments, and dozens may have died because they could not get treated in time. Spurred to action, Congress created a program aimed at temporarily alleviating the strain on the VA: Veterans who lived more than 40 miles from a health-care facility or who had to wait more than 30 days for an appointment could take their benefits outside the system and seek treatment from private doctors...
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Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart
David Leonhardt | New York Times | August 7, 2017
Many Americans can’t remember anything other than an economy with skyrocketing inequality, in which living standards for most Americans are stagnating and the rich are pulling away. It feels inevitable. But it’s not. A well-known team of inequality researchers — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — has been getting some attention recently for a chart it produced. It shows the change in income between 1980 and 2014 for every point on the distribution, and it neatly summarizes the recent soaring of inequality...
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Public Health Tech: The Future of Health Tech You Never Heard Of
Marquesa Finch, MPH | The Doctor Weighs In | January 29, 2017
Digital Health has experienced a glorious boom in the last decade and is expected to reach $379.3 Billion by 2024 with 25% of the growth occurring between 2016 and 2024. Patient management can now be done on user-friendly platforms; physicians can remotely monitor their patients with mobile devices and telemedicine; and personal trackers and genetic testing are allowing patients easier access to their own health data. Clearly, we understand the kind of power technology has on improving the delivery of care and management of disease...
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Top White House Biodefense Official to Address Bipartisan Panel
Press Release |
Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense |
November 12, 2018
The Trump Administration recently released a National Biodefense Strategy to better defend the United States against myriad biological threats. The development and implementation of a comprehensive national biodefense strategy were among the top recommendations made by the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense in 2015. This Wednesday, November 14, the Panel will convene at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. to gain a better understanding of how far the Executive Branch has come in implementing its National Blueprint for Biodefense.
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VA Wait Times As Good or Better Than Private Sector: Report
Richard Sisk | Military.com | September 20, 2017
VA health care is as good or in some cases better than that offered by the private sector on key measures including wait times, according to a study commissioned by the American Legion. The report, issued Tuesday and titled "A System Worth Saving," concludes that the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system "continues to perform as well as, and often better than, the rest of the U.S. health-care system on key quality measures," including patient safety, satisfaction and care coordination...
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What Ethical Issues Does the Precision Medicine Initiative Face?
David Raths | Healthcare Informatics | July 10, 2017
"This is the largest government study ever on its own people.” Nancy Kass, Sc.D., a professor of bioethics and public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, was talking about the Precision Medicine Initiative, now called the All of Us Research Program. Kass says she makes that bold statement deliberately and with humility, because she chairs the institutional review board (IRB) for the project, which aims to create a million-person cohort...
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What’s Next for Health Care? Confused Congress Should Look to Indian Country
Mark Trahant | Yes! Magazine | July 28, 2017
Senate Republicans campaigned against Obamacare for seven years. Yet there was never an alternative that had support from a majority of their own party. The problem is simple: Many (not all) Republicans see health care programs that help people—the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, etc.—as welfare. Others look at the evidence and see these programs that are effective: insuring people, creating jobs, supporting a rural economy, and actually resulting in better health outcomes. Evidence-based success stories...
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