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...
wasteful spending
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White House Officials: To Manage the Government, Open Its Data
White House officials see standardizing federal data as a crucial step to making government more effective and efficient. Opening that data to the public could also spur economic growth, they said. “Open data is not just a transparency exercise,” said acting Federal Chief Information Officer Margie Graves. “It really is integral to the management of government itself. Everybody recognizes that this is the platform on which we have to build our house”...
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America's Dismal International Rankings - Time to Innovate Our Way Out of Our Messes
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Americans Can’t Handle The Truth
David Stockman’s new book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, is getting a lot of attention these days. I recommend you don’t buy it. It’s much better to ignore the book and continue to listen to the White House and Wall Street, both of which tell us everything will work out just fine. Read More »
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Chuck Hagel’s Assessment Of iEHR: “I Didn’t Think We Knew What The Hell We Were Doing.”
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel testified before a Congressional hearing yesterday about the Integrated Electronic Health Record project: “I didn’t think we knew what the hell we were doing.” I’m glad that he put the stop to the effort after only $1 billion, the UK National Health Service blew an incredible $17 billion before pulling the plug. Read More »
FedScoop Guide: FITARA
With sequestration and looming budget cuts, it’s hard to know what the future of federal government IT will look like. To make it a little easier, FedScoop created a quick guide on a piece of legislation that’s getting a lot of attention right now: the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act. Read More »
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Fee Data May Deter Docs From Ordering Labs
Displaying the cost of a test to providers at the time of ordering led to a modest decrease in the number of orders for laboratory studies placed over a 6-month period, investigators reported. Read More »
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Fighting The Next Obamacare Tech Fail
In terminating CGI Federal's role in HealthCare.gov, President Obama finally "fired" one of the parties responsible for Obamacare's faulty website. That may appease the chorus of those calling on Obama to hold someone "accountable," but it does nothing to fix the underlying problem: the system for selecting contractors that picked CGI Federal in the first place. Read More »
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House: $1B Wasted On Vets’ Medical E-Records
The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have wasted about $1 billion in a failed effort to streamline medical record-keeping, the chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee said in a hearing Wednesday. Read More »
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How Much Are Misaligned Incentives In Health Care Costing Tax Payers?
On Christmas Eve, I took care of a patient who had just undergone surgery for an infected artificial shoulder. He was to be discharged on intravenous antibiotics three times a day for six weeks. [...] The total cost of this is approximately $7000 for nursing visits, antibiotics and supplies... Read More »
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Humetrix Launches Cross-Platform iBlueButton® Mobile Apps Enabling Patient-Physician Exchange Of Health Records Between Apple And Android Devices
Humetrix today introduced cross-platform capability for its award-winning iBlueButton® apps, enabling consumers and physicians for the first time to securely exchange health records and other clinical information at the point of care, regardless of whether they use an iPhone®, iPad® or Android smartphone. Read More »
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Reform Update: JAMA Study Suggests Money Alone May Not Be Enough To Improve Performance, Reduce Costs
One goal of health reform, among many, is to break the industry's dependence on incentives for hospitals and doctors to do a high volume of business. Incentives for volume invite wasteful spending, of course, and also can be harmful if patients receive unnecessary care as a result. Read More »
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The Republican Case For Waste In Health Care
Conservatives love to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to government programs—except in health care. In fact, working with drug companies and warning of “death panels,” they slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research. Here’s how that happened, and why it can’t stand. Read More »
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The Sabotage Device Within Obamacare
Much of the March/April issue of the Washington Monthly is about conservative efforts to sabotage key first-term accomplishment of the Obama administration via the regulatory and other implementation processes. Read More »
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The Sorry State Of Veterans' Health Care
Here is a sad lesson in government waste. Since 2008, the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) have spent over $1 billion to create an integrated electronic health record (iEHR). Four years and $1 billion later, not a single line of code has been implemented. Read More »
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VanRoekel Called To Testify On Wasteful IT Spending
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has called a hearing to discuss “the wasteful and dysfunctional fashion in which the federal government acquires information technology systems and services.” Read More »
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