Healthy Lifestyle

Author Archive

By Robert A. Berenson and Nicole Cafarella One of the few health policy issues that receives bipartisan support is the need to dramatically alter the way providers are paid, shifting from “paying for volume” to “paying for value” to alter the trajectory of health care spending while improving health care quality. To facilitate this shift, the Affordable ...

By PETER PRONOVOST, MD Patients, providers and the public have much to celebrate. Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare website added central line-associated bloodstream infections in intensive care units to its list of publicly reported quality of care measures for individual hospitals. Why is this so important? There is universal support for the ...

By Dave Chase Health system CEOs would be well advised to study what newspaper industry leaders did (or perhaps more appropriately, didn’t do) when faced with a dramatic industry change. Turn back the clock 15 years and the following dynamics were present: Newspaper leaders knew full well that dramatic change was underway and even made some tactical ...

By Andrew Schutzbank Peggy was in her early 70s and suffered from a terrible lung disease known as pulmonary hypertension. Her case was so bad that she had a pump infusing a medicine under her skin 24 hours a day to keep the blood supply to her lungs open. Once started, this medicine, treprostinil, was known ...

By Peter Ubel, MD I first realized something was amiss when I picked up my prescriptions and the pharmacist explained that she could not fill the anti-malarial medications as prescribed: “Your medication plan only pays for 30 days of pills, and your prescription was for five pills.” The pharmacist continued: “Your PBM [that's an acronym for ...

By PETER PRONOVOST, MD Patients, providers and the public have much to celebrate. Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare website added central line-associated bloodstream infections in intensive care units to its list of publicly reported quality of care measures for individual hospitals. Why is this so important? There is universal support for the ...

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI After years of telling us they are serious this time and everyone in the health care system had better be ready on time to implement the new disease coding system, CMS said today the whole project is going to be delayed indefinitely. The new ICD-10 system requires payers and providers to convert from the ...

By David Shaywitz A few quick impressions from last week’s FutureMed extravaganza put on by Singularity University at the Museum of Computer History, a stone’s throw from Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The event featured an exhibition session where emerging digital health companies (with some others) demo’d their initial products, followed by a plenary session introduced by FutureMed ...

By John Halamka, MD I support over 3000 clinicians in heterogeneous sites of care – solo practitioners, small offices, multi-specialty facilities, community hospitals, academic medical centers, and large group practices. In every location there is some level of dissatisfaction with their EHR.   Complaints about usability, speed of documentation, training, performance, and personalization limitations are typical.   ...

By John Lumpkin, MD “When it comes to health care, information is power.” This comment from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has sparked a heated debate among doctors and patient advocates about the merits and drawbacks of giving patients easy access to their lab results, doctors’ notes and other personal medical information. ...