#WWBR Week of December 15, 2014

U.S. Corporate Health Exchanges Find No New Blue Chip Clients
Caroline Humer for Reuters
“While blue chip companies may be taking a wait and see attitude towards HIX for their employees, the broader and much larger mid-market will move more quickly.” – John

Forbidden Topic in Health Policy Debate: Cost Effectiveness
Aaron E. Carroll for The New York Times
“The conversation about prices, costs, and value in healthcare should begin to trickle down into everyday life thanks to price transparency, coverage expansion, and employers offloading responsibility onto employees. Cost effectiveness is a critical part of value, but national discourse has yet to move past the politicized image of death panels. Hopefully this will begin to change over the rest of the decade, pushing healthcare orgs to bring down prices, reduce variation, and improve the average consumers’ bang for the buck.” – Naveen

Patient Use of Online Reviews IndustryView | 2014
John Leslie for Software Advice
“Patients are increasingly looking to online reviews sites such as Yelp and Healthgrades before picking doctors. The most important finding here might be that nearly half of survey respondents said they’d be willing to go to an out-of-network doctor based on positive reviews. We should take these numbers with a grain of salt, but pay attention – especially HCO’s – to the growing confidence of the healthcare consumer in making their own decisions.” – Naveen

Top Ten Healthcare Charts For 2014
Dan Munro for Forbes
“Dan typically writes insightful articles on the healthcare IT landscape and at times steps back and looks at broader issues. This article provides some great graphics to chew on.” – John

The Odd Math of Medical Tests: One Scan, Two Prices, Both High
Elisabeth Rosenthal for The New York Times
“Those of us deeply involved in healthcare know this story well. But the NY Times writing a serious article on the subject of widely disparate costs for same procedure – surely questionable pricing practices will start showing up on Yelp and other social media sites. Healthcare orgs, consider yourself warned.” – John

Why I Oppose Payment Reform
Alan Weil for Health Affairs
“Alan Weil wrote a thoughtful and brief piece on Health Affairs on why he opposes payment reform in its current iteration. In the post, Alan outlines why he opposes current payment reform efforts, the lack of evidence to support it, and that the current efforts are not insufficiently disruptive. It is really worth taking a look at the comments too because a number of prominent individuals gave useful commentary.” – Matt

‘Shadow IT’ Gradually Sapping Power and Budget from CIOs
Kat Hall for The Register
“Shadow IT spending is the topic and growth is the theme of this short article based on a global survey. While I can’t quibble with the overall conclusion, we have seen this story before. Two decades ago departments were buying UNIX servers and databases willy-nilly without consulting the IT department. In healthcare, I’m not sure that departments are all that interested in buying equipment but buying cloud services will probably be a different story.” – Brian

Grahame Grieve on What Project Argonaut Means for the HL7/FHIR Community
Grahame Grieve for Open Health News
“As interest in FHIR heats up, the people doing the hard work of standards development are taking some time to publicize and explain their work to the wider world. This short article summarizes where FHIR is in the overall process of becoming a standard. It also describes the relationship between the FHIR standard, Project Argonaut, and ONC’s DAF project with some great links to supporting information.” – Brian

State Report Card on Transparency of Physician Quality Information (PDF)
Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute
“Even with fairly lenient criteria for states to achieve high scores on this Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute report, the results were pretty abysmal. Overwhelming majorities of states received an “F” simply because their quality transparency efforts have little/no data available on individual physicians. Only two states – Minnesota and Washington – received an “A” in physician quality information transparency. They authors pulled no punches either and wrote that “there is a shocking lack of objective and useful public information on physicians, making informed choices almost impossible for most Americans.” – Matt

257,000 Doctors Will Get Medicare Pay Cut For Using Paper Records
Bruce Japsen for Forbes
“More than 257k eligible providers are going to start receiving 1% reductions in their Medicare or Medicaid payments starting next year for not complying for MU. Given the poor results of providers successfully achieving Stage 2 to date (<5% at the end of Oct) and our estimates which have <40% of eligible providers ultimately achieving Stage 2 MU attestation, it will be very interesting next year to see the political will of Congress to continue to enforce MU penalties on such large number of providers and add additional other penalties too including not reporting for the PQRS program.” – Matt