Diet and Nutrition. Natural Health, and Healthy Living

This is not a fun day for athenahealth, and frankly with HIMSS coming up, not a fun time to have such a day. None of this has anything to do with their products or their client services, but late last night the company announced that it’s going to be restating its earnings. You can see a longer discussion on The Street.combut essentially it appears that athenahealth has been amortizing its installation costs over one year whereas they ought to have been doing it over more years. The net result is that they’ll have to restate some earnings and are going to miss the next earnings reporting deadline. The stock is off roughly 12% today.

(more...)

We started with what to do if your medical spa doesn't have any Facebook fans. But 'content' that your patients want is what will drive readership.

(more...)

Not so long ago (actually less than 2 weeks), there was quite the spat on THCB between the Four Horseman (Klepper, Kibbe, Lazewski & Enthoven) and Maggie Mahar. Essentially it came down to this question:

Is there enough in the current House & Senate bills to restrain spending and remake the health care system? Or is the whole effort so bought off by the health industry as to be a waste of time?

I put myself in the camp of agreeing with both the Four Horsemen (that the bills were pretty much emasculated) and with Maggie (in that at least we’ll get some significant improvements in coverage for the uninsured).

(more...)

In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Norbert Gleicher suggests that expert panels won't improve health care because the the quality of the research on which they would base their physician practice guidelines is not reliable. Instead, he suggests that our system can self-correct when experts lead us astray. He asserts that we have a "well working free market of ideas in health care, where effective therapies can rise to the surface and win out."

(more...)

After years of disappointing trial and error, a vaccine shows success in a clinical trial in preventing the transmission of HIV/AIDS. Granted, the trial shows a less than one-third success rate. Compared to the 85 percent success rate of the new H1N1 swine flu vaccine, that's quite low. Yet it clearly is the most promising success to date , and we can only hope that it soon leads to a workable vaccine that that immunizes against the HIV/AIDS virus.
(more...)

This post is aimed at serving as an interlude to the "public option/death panels" discussions. No matter what healthcare reform bill, if any, is passed this fall, HIT will be part of the program. Four short years ago I was involved in the creation of a comprehensive, some would say monolithic, EMR/Practice Management/Billing system. This new product was built in reaction to the very large, very expensive and very clunky systems already on the market.
(more...)

I want to call your attention to an important survey done by the California-based Campaign for Effective Patient Care. They surveyed California voters on their understanding of evidence-based medicine.

The bad news is that patients think their health care treatment is generally evidence-based even though that assumption is highly questionable. The good news is that patients want it to be evidence-based.

At a time when we hear anecdotal evidence, particularly from town hall meetings, that people don't want any "interference" between them and their doctors they do seem to appreciate they need to get all of the facts when making a treatment decision.
(more...)

what he planned all along?" title="The Speech: Could this have been
what he planned all along?" />

White House Photo

A conventional look at The Speech:
(more...)

I don’t use THCB much to point out what good we all can do—I keep that for my year-end letter—but my favorite charity (Saigon’s Childrens Charity) is at its financial year end and just sent me the reports for the kidsI support. I’ve asked people who want to talk to me in the past to “buy a kid a bike.” And as it’s late on a Friday and I’m about to go out and take my wife to dinner, I thought you might all think about alternate uses for the $100 I’m about to spend (Yes, she’s a cheap date). Here’s what $100 buys for a very, very poor kid in Vietnam (and because of the recession donations are off this year, so they need more help).

(more...)

What do doctors in other countries make? Take a look

Source: Congressional Research Service analysis; see notes in table below

In response to Uwe Reinhardt’s recent post on “rationing” doctors’ salaries, a number of readers wrote in asking about physician compensation in other countries.

(more...)