Massachusetts Health Reforms: Uninsurance Remains Low, Self-Reported Health Status Improves As State Prepares To Tackle Costs [Web First]
The Massachusetts health reform initiative enacted into law in 2006 continued to fare well in 2010, with uninsurance rates remaining quite low and employer-sponsored insurance still strong. Access to health care also remained strong, and first-time reductions in emergency department visits and hospital inpatient stays suggested improvements in the effectiveness of health care delivery in ...
Why Mint.com for Health Is a Terrible Idea
By Wade Roush If you’re a hammer, you just want to smash nails; if you’re a programmer, you just want to build features. But features do not a successful product make. This is the central myopia that eventually blinds even the most brilliant engineer-entrepreneurs, unless they’re smart enough to surround themselves with people who can check their bias. If you want ...
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Catching the Attention of Doctors
By Rebecca Coelius I’ve had the luck to attend medical school in the city of San Francisco during what will be looked back on as the start of transformational change in our health care system. My growing interest in technology and new business models as the disruptive forces behind this change, as well as marriage to ...
Restoring Office Workflows to the EMR: Or How I Restored Patient Face Time and Got Back the Joy in Medicine
By MARGARET POLANECZKY, MD A report from The Blog That Ate Manhattan: The Problem : Lost Face Time = Lost Joy One day, about 5 years into using the electronic medical record in my practice, I came to the realization that I wasn’t having fun anymore. I was sitting throughout most of every office encounter facing a computer screen, ...
New Federal Policy Initiatives To Boost Health Literacy Can Help The Nation Move Beyond The Cycle Of Costly ‘Crisis Care’ [Web First]
Health literacy is the capacity to understand basic health information and make appropriate health decisions. Tens of millions of Americans have limited health literacy—a fact that poses major challenges for the delivery of high-quality care. Despite its importance, health literacy has until recently been relegated to the sidelines of health care improvement efforts aimed at ...
Why This Well-Known Biotech Firm Deploys 17,000 iPads and iPhones
By ERIC LAI There were some impressive enterprise deployments discussed at the AppNation conference in San Francisco on Thursday. I’ll lead off with Genentech, the Bay Area biotech firm that is now a subsidiary of Roche. Their 7,000 iPad rollout was news to me, and ranks them sixth on my list of largest iPad ...
How Healthcare’s Embrace of Mobility has Turned Dangerous
By Eric Lai No industry has adopted mobility faster than healthcare. Doctors love their devices. 81% of physicians have smartphones. They also love their apps. 38% of them use medical apps daily. One-third use smartphones or tablets to access electronic medical records today, with another 20% expecting to start using them this year. For instance, 200 doctors and ...
Why Didn’t ICD-10 Implementation Bring Down Europe’s Health System?
By Don Fluckinger We’re seeing a lot of pushback against ICD-10 implementation, with the American Medical Association’s “vigorous opposition” at the extreme. Gloom and doom types equate to potential IT disaster to Y2K. Ever since watching T. Bedirhan Üstün, M.D. — curator of the International Classification of Diseases, the master coding set from which ICD-10 is ...
Health Reform Gets Its Day In Court–The Supreme One [Entry Point]
Justices could leave the Affordable Care Act intact, in shambles, or somewhere in between—and just months before the 2012 presidential election.
