On Saturday December 6, President-elect Obama announced the three major pillars of his economic recovery plan: rebuild our roads/bridges, enhance our schools including broadband, and deploy electronic health records for every clinician and hospital in the US.
I've written several recent blogs about the cost of electronic health records, the state of interoperability, and my predictions for the early healthcare IT activities of the Obama administration.
The New York Times published a story this month about one of the biggest medical trials ever organized by the federal government, a study that showed that the newest, most expensive drugs used to treat high blood pressure (a.k.a. hypertension) work no better than inexpensive diuretics—water pills that flush excess fluid and salt from the body. Moreover, the research revealed that the pricier drugs increase the risk of heart failure and stroke.
This week, Don Berwick will announce the results of the 5 Million Lives Campaign before thousands of people in Nashville attending the National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care.
Twenty years ago, it was almost heretical to question the quality of American health care. The common refrain being that it was unarguably the best in the world.
Decades of work by Berwick and others, however, have dispelled that myth, and the underlying belief that medical errors and hospital acquired infections are simply an artifact of the business. These quality champions deem it unacceptable that as many as 98,000 Americans die annually from preventable medical errors, and that most Americans receive the recommended care only half the time. They've spent years building their case, and in turn created a social movement around their cause.
The Institute of Medicine just released its long-awaited report on trainee duty hours. It is well researched and balanced, and its recommendations appropriately reflect what we know vs. what we believe. Now the fun begins.
Let’s start with a little background, some of it drawn from my book Understanding Patient Safety:
Let’s be honest. Traditional resident schedules – on call every third night, staying up for 48 hours in a row, and working 120 hours per week – were both inhumane and immoral.
Americans spend more money on health care than any other nation, but get far less in return, say multiple health care executives in Sunday's Washington Post.
That's not news to readers of this blog, but probably is not yet common knowledge among the general American taxpayer. That might change. The news media seems to be writing about this "value gap" more frequently, particularly in citing the growing momentum behind creating a center for comparative effectiveness research to evaluate drugs, devices and treatments to find out what works best.
The American Medical Informatics Association will announce today that it has received a $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote health informatics and biomedical education and training worldwide, particularly in developing countries.
This will be the first project of a new program called 20/20, in which the International Medical Informatics Association and its regional affiliates, including AMIA, will attempt to train 20,000 informatics professionals globally by 2020. This is an outgrowth of the AMIA 10x10 program to train 10,000 people in informatics in the U.S. by 2010. IMIA will present details of 20/20 this week at the Wellcome Trust in London.
I have mentioned this many times but it bears repeating with three recent news articles - the electronic health record itself is not a game changer but it is a powerful information gathering tool.
However, by gathering information in a single collaborative place, EHR technology allows all clinical providers to measure, monitor, and begin to improve the way they provide care. It is this later part, which is part of the overall organizational transformation enabled by the technology (not solely because of it), that allows an organization to achieve the promised high performance results of an often painful EHR implementation.
Several stories in today's papers make it clear that the atmosphere for health reform today truly is different than when the Clinton Administration took over in the 1990s.
Here's the bullet points in support of that thesis:
Cleveland Clinic launched its pilot partnership with Microsoft HealthVault to provide personal health records for 150,000 patients.
CMS selected four companies to pilot its personal health record program: Google, HealthTrio, NoMoreClipboard, and Passport MD. Beginning in January, Medicare beneficiaries will have their claims data automatically added to their PHRs.
Google launched Flu Tracker, a program to help CDC track disease outbreaks in real time by looking for regional trends in search terms.
Ruth Given has spent the last few months doing an exhaustive study of the physician ratings business. Ruth is an independent health economist and consultant who has in the past worked for Kaiser, the California Medical Association and Deloitte Consulting. We’re very happy to make her study available on THCB and the Health 2.0 Blog. You can download the full report at the end of this introductory article — Matthew Holt
The past few years have seen an explosion in growth of websites allowing patients to review/rate (usually rant or rave about) their health care providers. Recent mainstream media attention has focused on the rating of physicians, with over 30 such sites now operating. A few sites, including RateMDs and Healthgrades, have been around for a number of years, but several high profile initiatives were recently launched. Last fall, national health plan Anthem announced that it would be partnering with restaurant rater Zagat to allow its enrollees to rate their MDs online. And in April, Angie’s List, whose subscribers rate a wide variety of local service companies, began to include all types of health care providers, including physicians.