A surprise move by ONC/HHS indicates the wheels may be falling off health IT reform at about the same rate they've fallen off Democrats' broader health reforms.
David Blumenthal and his staff have unveiled two separate plans to test and certify EHR technology products and services. We don't think this is a good idea. We've supported the purpose and spirit of the ARRA/HITECH incentive programs, and believe ONC's/HHS' re-definition of EHR technology puts it on a trajectory to improve the quality and efficiency of health care in the U.S. But this recently-announced two-stage EHR technology certification plan bears all the marks of a hastily drawn up blueprint that, if rushed into production, could easily collapse of its own bureaucratic weight.
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8
March
The Massachusetts health reform law Part II, enacted in 2008 - laid the groundwork for cost control and quality improvement, as a follow-on to the initial legislation's emphasis on achieving near-universal coverage. The legislation authorized several studies -- including a report published a few months back on global payment strategies -- and set the stage for hearings on health care cost containment to be held before the state Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (DHCFP), which are scheduled to begin March 16, 2010.
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17
February
Twenty-seven years ago, President Ronald Reagan and a Congress split between Republican and Democratic control agreed to a radical new payment scheme for Medicare. The resulting legislation trimmed billionsof dollars from the federal budget and caused medical inflation to plummet, yet still maintained quality of care.
Although this stunning achievement led to a permanent change in how both the public and private sector pay for health care, it has gone curiously unmentioned during more than a year of rancorous health reform debate. Nor isit likely to arise at the much-ballyhooed bipartisan summit. The topic simply raises too many squirm-inducing questions. In this instance, conservatives and liberals alike can agree that political discretion is the better part of valor.
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16
February
While health care reformers argue about what it would take to “break the curve” of health care inflation, the state of Maryland has done it, at least when it comes to hospital spending.
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10
February
This April 6–7, the Health 2.0 Europe conference will feature the many ways in whichWeb 2.0 tools are providing innovative solutions to, amongst others, our fundamental need for self-expression, known more recently as “user-generated content”.
Several panels will refer to these issues, but we will focus in this post on the Hospital and Payers’ panel. Payers want to ensure that their patients are being oriented to good care. Hospitals want to know that they are being considered “justly”.The Health 2.0 panel will include demonstrations byGuide Santé (France) and Patient Opinion (UK), both web 2.0 sites created by physicians concerned by patient satisfaction with hospitals and clinics. Payerslike the UK NHSand Big-Direkt from Germany will participate in the conversation and Big-Direkt will also demo their new online tools.
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9
February
Every now and then, I read and enjoy a book, but only later fully appreciate it as its lessons and insights slowly become apparent. Judging by the number of times I’ve said, “That reminds me of Gawande’s observations about ___” over the past month, The Checklist Manifesto is one such book.
In this short, deceptively simple volume, Atul (who I count as both friend and inspiration) discusses the history of “the lowly checklist,” the impact of checklists on various industries, how he came to understand the value of checklists to medical care, and what makes a useful checklist. Most of this content could have been written by a thoughtful healthcare journalist. But Atul put his interest in checklists to practical use, spearheading a WHO initiative to test a checklist-based “safe surgery” program in 8 diverse hospitals around the world, an effort that saved hundreds of lives. His description of this program forms the core of the book.
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8
February
Are we finally ready to close the door on the much-disputed link between the MMR vaccine and autism?
On January 30, Britain’s General Medical Council ruled that Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist, had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting his research that established a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. And yesterday, the British medical journal Lancet finally retracted the resulting 1998 study authored by Wakefield that helped drive MMR vaccination rates in the U.K. down to the point where in 2008, measles was officially declared “endemic” in the country.
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5
February
According to the headlines, 10 percent of Americans are unemployed. The truth is that closer to 17 percent of the population cannot find full-time work; this number includes workers who have become discouraged and have given up looking for work as well as those who have settled for part-time jobs because they cannot find the full-time employment that they need.
The situation is not going to change anytime soon. As Princeton economist Paul Krugman recently warned: “We are facing mass unemployment — unemployment that will blight the lives of millions of Americans for years to come.”
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26
January
One day before 2009 passed into history, the much anticipated final definition of “meaningful use†was released by CMS and ONC, 556 pages and 136 pages, respectively. The blogosphere experts rushed to summarize the contents, some accurate and some less so, and just like everything that has to do with health care reform, for every rule making there are a dozen new questions being raised by the already thoroughly confused stakeholders at large.
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9
January
Right now, American health care information technology is undergoing two enormous leaps. First, it is moving onto Web-based and mobile platforms - which are less expensive and facilitate information exchange - and away from client-server enterprise-centric technologies, which are more expensive and have limited interoperability. In addition, more EHR development activity is headed into the cloud, driven by large consumer-based firms with the technological depth to take it there. Both these trends will facilitate greater openness, lower user cost, improved ease of use, and faster adoption of EHRs.
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5
January