From Bathroom to Healthroom
Juhan Sonin for Involution Studios
“Met Juhan years ago as we both exited our first HIMSS event a bit depressed at the state of affairs in HIT. Juhan, who is about as forward thinking individual of anyone I’ve ever met has gone on to start goinvo.com and this piece gives you some idea as his vision for healthcare. Some aspects are a little scary from a personal/privacy view but in totality are compelling.” – John
Preventing Suicides Among Veterans Is at Center of Bill Passed by Senate
Richard Oppel Jr for The New York Times
“The US Senate approved a landmark bill for Veterans’ mental health services. It seems odd for a piece of health reform legislation (or any legislation these days) to enjoy so much bipartisan support – but the issue of suicide and PTSD among Vets is reaching a populist crescendo, on the backs of a Hollywood movie and Superbowl commercials. While this progress is certainly laudable, one wonders if this will have a spillover effect for broader mental health care reform in the US.” – Naveen
Want to Prevent Thousands of Deaths a Year? Make Doctors and Nurses Meditate
Melinda Ring for The Washington Post
“This article talks about the disappointing progress in stemming the serious problem of hospital-acquired infections. It makes the important point that clinicians are awash in demands to implement best practices designed to ensure quality. This article prescribes meditation as a way to help them focus on what is important. I am guessing that meditation might not be a panacea although it will probably help some get a better handle on the best practices being demanded of them, at least some of the time.” – Brian
How mobile is transforming healthcare
The Economist – Special Report
“A survey by the Economist finds a number of high level indicators that mobile is going to play a far more substantial role in healthcare in the next 5 years. Of course this is not revelatory by any stretch – but worth a quick scan (the infographic serves as a nice summary). Of note is the 5 year timeline prediction for when mobile health will really start making an impact at the patient level, which is far more realistic and aligned with Chilmark’s purview, given the lack of progress on mobile tools by most incumbent vendors today.” – Naveen
The Value of Health Information Technology: Filling the Knowledge Gap
Robert Rudin, et al. for American Journal of Managed Care
“ONC funded article in the American Journal of Managed Care that lays out a conceptual framework for how health IT should be evaluated and highlights some of the potential shortfalls of the published research to date including not adequately including and measuring all of the principal benefits and costs of a particular health IT application, not considering a specific or long enough time frame to evaluate the standard in the study, and raising the point that the ROI can vary depending upon the perspective of who is purchasing the solution. Articles which only consider or measure one particular outcome and a limited time frame aren’t sufficient to estimate ROI.” – Matt
The Rise of Social Graphs for Businesses
Sangeet Paul Choudary for The Harvard Business Review
“Plenty of talk about how healthcare orgs might use the digital exhaust of consumers tweets and facebook likes to better gain an understanding of the health of their community, but what about the commercial social graph in healthcare. Today, HCOs rely heavily on GPOs like Premier and MedAssets, but what if they begin breaking from pack mentality and seek a platform that leverages social graphs for assessing vendors?” – John
Specialist Doctors Head for Exit as U.S. Shifts Payments
Alexander Wayne for Bloomberg
“An article in Bloomberg which argues that the shift from volume- to value-based payment models will reward PCPs for work they weren’t paid for in the past, such as monitoring patients between appointments. However, specialists will find new compensation models most difficult because their compensation is largely based on the number of services they perform, which could prove problematic for patients as well. The article goes on to highlight how some of these changes might play among oncologists including it being a key area for bundled payments. I would agree to a point but a lot of this depends on what happens to the composition and power of the RVS Update Committee (RUC) which currently makes recommendations to CMS on revising current and adding new CPT codes. Given the heavy specialist representation on the RVS Update Committee, you can bet they will work quite hard to ‘protect their turf’ and ultimately their paychecks from any CMS payment reforms.” – Matt
Clearing the Way for Patients to Get Access to their Data (PDF)
National Association for Trusted Exchange
“The National Association of Trusted Exchange unveiled a new “trust community” to send patient records directly to patients. Pardon our cynicism, but this seems like much ado about nothing. In a typically self-congratulatory manner, this press release namedrops public and private-sector participants without offering up a single instance of what this means for patients who struggle to get access to their information. Who is the audience for this? Who are the true winners? What is the bigger goal, and when are we going to get there? How is this “trust framework” going to jive with market-driven solutions like Apple Healthkit, which has already begun to accomplish the reverse of NATE’s proposed use case ( incorporation of PGHD into the record), minus all the fuss?” – Naveen
ABIM Announces Immediate Changes to MOC Program
American Board of Internal Medicine
“ABIM finally bowed under some very intense and vocal pressure from their membership to change the Maintenance of Certification medical license requirements. The Practice Assessment, Patient Voice and Patient Safety requirements will be immediately suspended for at least two years and I have real doubts if they will be implemented anytime in the near future. While it was well intentioned, there were a lot of legit criticism if these new requirements would do anything but add yet another considerable regulatory burden on physicians without leading to any kind of improvement in healthcare outcomes. If medical societies really wanted to get serious about improving outcomes, they would find more proactive ways to potentially suspend or remove unethical and/or unprofessional physicians from practice instead for certain types of behavior or conduct.” – Matt
Avalere White Paper: Facilitating a Transition to Using PROs to Measure Performance
Avalere White Paper
“Avalere has put out a white paper about the importance of patient reported outcomes (PRO) to emerging, value-based models of care. We offer a mixed reaction – while PRO are certainly a pivotal part of patient engagement and have shown promise in research oriented delivery settings (e.g. clinical trials), this report’s executive summary smacks of the typical snail’s pace of healthcare reform. At their heart – PRO are simply a form of PGHD. We’d love to see a stronger push for outright incorporation of surveys, short-form questionnaires, and the like into mainstream workflows and clinical tools.” – Naveen
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