by Mark Blatt, M.D. April 2012 – The simple truth about healthcare in the US is that the product the industry offers is too expensive for anyone to actually afford. Healthcare has been unaffordable for individuals for a long time. More recently, healthcare costs are threatening to bankrupt not only large self-funded corporations, but also… Read more »
Healthcare Musings
Radiologists: Adapt or Face the Consequences
by Richard Toren March 2012 -The Affordable Care Act has had a tectonic change effect across all segments of healthcare. Hospitals have become “health systems” through acquisitions of other hospitals, absorption of physician practices, and movements to accept total risk as if they were insurance companies. At the same time, there have been wholesale purchases… Read more »
Integrated Endoscopy: The Promise of Freeing Patient Data
by David Guy February 2012 – As the ARRA act incentivizes physicians to jettison paper files in favor of electronic records, integrating analog patient data to a digital ecosystem is prohibitive and problematic. Traditionally, medical device companies have focused on the device, and healthcare IT has focused on the data. Little work has been done… Read more »
“Fourth Dimensional Thinking”
by Mark Tomaino January 2012 – During a now distant 2011 holiday party, a social acquaintance asked me why I was so excited about the future of private equity investment in healthcare information technology (“HCIT”) companies. My somewhat bearish friend contexted his question with a litany of relevant observations, including that the HCIT landscape was… Read more »
Empowering Consumers to Manage their Health and Healthcare
by Mike Critelli December 2011 – We are at the beginning of a potentially transformative way of thinking about health and the role of healthcare and health insurance in our society. We demand the best care at the lowest cost, but we are using health management tools that are obsolete and inadequate in enabling our… Read more »
Unleash Your Star Power: Using Data Analytics to Improve Medicare Advantage Star Rating
by Mike Coyne September 2011 – The rules of the game have changed. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, payments to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans will decrease on average an estimated 12 percent by 2017. To offset this lost revenue, MA plans must now focus efforts on demonstrating healthcare quality and efficiency… Read more »
Five Things Healthcare IT Can Learn from Facebook
by Albert Santalo August 2011 – The healthcare industry is facing a monumental shift in how it handles information. The paper records, faxes and phones calls are being replaced with electronic health records, emails and instant messages. As the industry transitions to technology-enabled health care, it could learn from how Facebook built its system to… Read more »
The Second Coming of Healthcare Information Technology
by Lisa Suennen July 2011 – Once upon a time there was “ehealth.” That time was the late 1990’s and there was a temporary ripple in The Force when anything that combined healthcare and the Internet had a suddenly popularity in the venture capital investment community. Companies like the original WebMD, the original Medscape, Mediconsult.com,… Read more »
Re-inventing HL7 for True Interoperability
by Eliot Muir June 2011 – HL7 was originally a grassroots movement. Vendors and providers got together and looked at the typical content of the real world interfaces they were implementing and put together a rough, yet relatively practical, standard which we know today as HL7 Version 2.X. Implementers played a big part of that… Read more »
Data Security in Healthcare: How Bad is it?
by Michael (Mac) H. McMillan May 2011 – Six years after the HIPAA Security Rule has gone into effect, 31,000 plus breaches of patient information have been reported. What’s especially disturbing is that the overwhelming majority of these incidents were either self-inflicted by the organization or totally avoidable. This month the National Institute of… Read more »