Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

(more...)

This Thursday I gave a presentation to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) about measuring quality using "traditional" and emerging, novel sources of healthcare data.

My definition of traditional data sources that are currently used to measure quality includes administrative claims data aggregated from hospital-based claims databses (for example, BIDMC has an Oracle respository called Casemix), payer-based databases (all have a claims warehouse to support disease management), physician organizations (Beth Israel Deaconess Physicians Organization has worked with Heathcare Data Services to create all payer business intelligence tools ) and health data consortia (such as the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium offers de-identified aggregated claims to enable institutional comparisons)"

(more...)

I’m very excited to be blogging for Medical Spa MD, a site I turn to to keep a pulse on what’s happening across America in the wonderful business that is aesthetic medicine! Where else on the web can you find such an open and informative forum to share, help and learn?

(more...)

Recently there has been some terrific news, it is now legal to smoke medical marijuana in New Jersey, you can now smoke legal medical marijuana in 13 states. I am sure more and more US states will follow as it is high time that the government helps its citizens who are in medical need.

New Jersey is that latest US state to recognise the huge value of medical marijuana. For both seriously ill patients and people who are trying to mimise the affects of various illnesses.
(more...)

Part 1 of this two-part piece asked why Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” seems to be affected by a palsy that causes health care price competition to fail, especially when employers and employees select health plans. This part focuses on a second failure of price competition: when insurers build their networks. Our hearts don’t often bleed for health insurers, but it’s possible to feel a little sympathy as they struggle to assemble networks of the most cost-effective providers.

(more...)

On the campaign trail Obama said that he would if elected cut the overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans by about $15bn a year. Once elected he confirmed that he would.

Stupid me thought that this would mean people on Wall Street would listen and that this freely available information would have been priced into the stocks. After all Bob Laszewski and I have been asking each other about this for quite some time!

So did I spend the last few weeks building up a big short position in the for-profit health insurers? No, this news was well known and already reflected in the stock price.

(more...)

The Dartmouth Atlas releases this afternoon a really cool interactive atlas showing the disparity in Medicare spending between states AND showing the relative growth rates in spending between metro areas. Fabulous graphics, fantastic research and much much more grist for the mill — why was annual average growth in Medica spending from 1992 to 2006 in Miami, FL, 5% while it was only 3% in Los Angeles, California?

And don't forget what Einstein said about compound interest.

(more...)

The economic stimulus package that President Obama has signed contains upwards of $20 billion to create electronic health records for most Americans within five years. The president has been very outspoken in his belief that EHRs are essential to health care reform and that the subsequent savings they’ll generate will help to strengthen the larger overall economy.

Whenever the subject of proliferating EHRs catches the national spotlight, you can bet that debates about privacy aren’t far behind. Indeed the privacy issue has already started to gain some traction in the media. In this video clip, CNN’s Campbell Brown and Elizabeth Cohen examine how easy it is for someone to obtain private medical information online by simply using someone’s Social Security number and date of birth.

(more...)

For those interested in the discourse here on neuroreductionism, several articles in the latest Philosophical Investigations are worth checking out. Here are the titles and abstracts:

Mind and Matter: A Physicist's View

John Polkinghorne

Queens' College, Cambridge

ABSTRACT

Physics explores a universe of wonderful order, expressed in terms of beautiful mathematical equations. Mathematics itself is understood to be the exploration of a realm of noetic reality. Science describes matter in terms of concepts with mind-like qualities. The psychosomatic nature of human persons is best understood in terms of a dual-aspect monism, in which matter and mind are complementary aspects of a unitary being. The new science of complexity theory, with its dualities of parts/whole and energy/information, offers modest resources for the speculative exploration of this idea. The intrinsic unpredictabilities present in nature afford the metaphysical opportunity to consider dissipative systems as exhibiting top–down causality.

(more...)

Just before I start today’s blog can you believe that someone bought my bobblehead of eBay for $47?………………………And I just found out who got it…..tell you that later. OK, do you remember the days when you came back from the mall with a new and shiny electrical appliance? And found it had been sold [...]

(more...)