The four global forces breaking all the trends
Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel for McKinsey
“Good abstract from McKinsey on the four global disruptive macroeconomic forces that will impact pretty much everything we do in all corners of the world. The implications for the healthcare sector are pretty clear if you read between the lines.” – John
DaVita Settles Another Lawsuit Amidst Accusations of “Managing Witnesses to Provide False Testimony,” After Justice Department Lost Interest in Participating
Roy M. Poses for Health Care Renewal
“If inefficiency, wastefulness, fraud, and the perverse incentives which enable all of the above are at the heart of our healthcare system’s cost crisis, this story is a microcosm of how awry things are. DaVita, a national, for-profit dialysis provider, is settling a whistle-blower lawsuit that charges it uses part of a treatment (say, 40mg of a 100mg pack) and throws away the rest, while charging Medicare for the full amount. Their CEO earns $17M a year, well more than a typical hospital or health plan executive. Many more sordid details in this post. There are truly so many unreformed pockets of the system beyond what the ACA has sought to fix.” – Naveen
Nurse Confessions: Don’t Get Sick in July
Alexandra Robbins for Politico Magazine
“Nurses make healthcare go around. This review of a book by someone who spent a year with nurses says what everyone knows happens but is afraid to say so. I will always remember the first time I heard a nurse say that anyone would be crazy to go to the hospital they work at. This review, which makes you want to read the book, is a great introduction to the lightning fast way that nurses operated.” – Brian
Thoughts on fixing the patient waiting game
Michelle Ronan Noteboom for HealthCareIT News
“Good anecdotal comparison of the state of customer service between healthcare and telecom. Though healthcare has not traditionally shown a whole lot of respect to a patient’s time, most big corporations behave the same way (just think about your interactions with Comcast). Improvements to waiting time, communication, self-scheduling, and so on will be slow – hopefully technology can bring new options and efficiencies to bear on the issue. While it remains to be seen exactly how powerful the forces of consumerism will be (and when they will take effect), there is without a doubt a connection to poor patient engagement at the health system level, and the shoddy customer service those systems have with people outside of the exam room.” – Naveen
U.S. News Unveils Its First Hospital Ratings in Common Care
Press Release in US News & World Report
“U.S. News released their Common Care ratings cover performance on five common medical conditions: heart bypass, hip replacement, knee replacement, congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. To generate the ratings, U.S. News evaluated more than 25 quality measures, like mortality, readmissions, infections and patient satisfaction scores, as well as more than 5 million patient records, accounting for patients’ health conditions, age, sex, socioeconomic status and other factors. While this is a step in the right direction to provide more readily available and granular quality data on hospitals, ~90 percent of the U.S. hospitals rated in each of the conditions or procedures were high performing or average which raises the question of just how much descriptive insight this provides to patients to compare and contrast different hospitals.” – Matt
Health Care Transparency Should Be About Strategy, Not Marketing
Thomas H. Lee in Harvard Business Review
“Interesting perspective from former executive at Partners Healthcare on the need for HCOs to move beyond translucency to transparency. It’s more than just marketing.” – John
Pharma and Self-Perception: Knights, Knaves or Pawns?
Sachin Jain in Medical Marketing and Media
“Nice commentary here by Sachin Jain on three of the public perceptions of the pharma industry. He correctly points out that the emerging view of the industry is not a flattering one, and points out a few ideas for regaining public trust: integrating more broadly with patient care (not just “at the point of prescription”), improve global patient access, leverage IT more thoroughly to improve efficiency and outcomes of drug delivery, and perhaps even mirror the delivery system’s shift to value with regards to how they are paid. The fundamental question here however, is what the industry’s underlying motivations truly are – and if profits matter more than people.” – Naveen
Your Health Insurer Wants to Know Exactly When You Get Pregnant
John Tozzi in Bloomberg
“This is what happens when payers have no timely access to clinical data. In this instance, they make arrangements with highly-specific and siloed consumer smartphone app providers. This gets them access to basic information about a patient that they would normally not get for months after the events they are interested in.” – Brian
The Triple Aimers have missed the mark
Paul Levy in Not Running a Hospital
“A scathing critique of national “triple aim” efforts from Beth Israel’s former CEO Paul Levy. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with the Triple Aim objectives. What’s wrong is that its most prominent advocates–some of the most influential health care experts in the country–have focused so heavily on that ideological approach to health care policy that they have absented themselves from the real battles over power, money, customer choice, and cost.”” – Naveen
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