Last week in London I met with two of the brightest lights in the UK's community of physicians looking at Health 2.0. Annabel Bentley is the medical director and head of informatics at Bupa, the UK-based non-profit health insurer, which owns Health Dialog amongst many other activities, and is also a sponsor of the upcoming Health 2.0 Europe conference. Emma Stanton is a psychiatrist, round-the-world yachtswoman, and has just spent two years on assignment working with Sir Liam Donaldson the Chief Medical Officer in the UK, and is on her way to a Harkness fellowship in the US working with Don Berwick & Eliot Fisher. Not bad company!
(more...)
24
February
I’m viewing the latest rumblings in the US health care debate from the confines of a clear but cold Britain, where the big news is that the country is joining the PIGS in entering economic meltdown—or at least being a lot more broke than it thought it was. (PIGS are Portugal, Greece, Ireland & Spain, not farm animals). And yet it appears that health reform is making if not a comeback then at least vigorous palpitations. The reason for this seems to be the strength that the Anthem Blue Cross/Wellpoint premium rises have imbued into the Administration.
(more...)
20
February
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.
(more...)
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.
(more...)
16
February
Speranza Avram from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Center for Health Leadershipwrites tosay that they’rehosting a two-day conference on April 15-16 called 21st Century Tools for Health Leaders: Using New Media and Health Communication Technologies. New media tools including social media, blogs, digital storytelling, video, virtual communities, Twitter, mobile phones and more, are being effectively used to facilitate the management of health organizations, support health education and disease management, inform health research and promote health advocacy. We invite health leaders, practitioners, educators and students to join us. Early bird registration ends March 12! Click here for more information about the conference and to register on-line. Or watch the video.
(more...)
10
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.
(more...)
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.
(more...)
9
February
When Charlie Baker began his run for Governor of Massachusetts, the Boston Globe critiqued his record and found it wanting (State aided Baker’s business triumph), a piece that struck me as weakly argued and unfair (Why is the Globe picking on Charlie Baker?). To the Globe’s credit, they published an excerpt of my post in their VoxOp column.
Saturday’s Globe carried a piece that was similar in tone (Baker finds campaign trove in health field) arguing that Baker is sucking big bucks out of the health care sector to fund his election campaign and implying that there is something wrong about it. After describing how some Democrats are giving to Baker (a Republican), the article says:
(more...)
9
February
The (not huge) world of Health 2.0, participatory medicine and ePatients has been fretting itself about a comment Susannah Fox (all hail) elevated into a post called “What’s the Point of Health 2.0”.
Here’s an excerpt from the comment from DarthMed,
The remaining 95% of “patients” out there are not motivated to become informed, or invest the time/energy/money in using any of these tools. These are the folks that know that fast food isn’t healthy, but are just too tired to choose differently. Some (emphasis on some) will do a standard google search when they receive a new diagnosis at best. Yet these are the folks – often folks with multiple chronic (often preventable) health problems, many overweight, on multiple medications, sometimes social problems – that have the real issue that needs fixing.
(more...)
6
February
Lumosity users and research collaborators often ask us for more information on the science that goes into the games and training applications on the site. To help make this info more accessible, we have just published The Science Behind Lumosity.
This document describes the background brain science, the principles upon which the brain games and courses were designed, and some of the research done using Lumosity. The goal was to break down the science of Lumosity into terms that anyone can understand while creating a comprehensive and precise presentation of the research.
(more...)
4
February