Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The premise is simple. Create markets, let consumers choose the products that fit them best, and the competition will lead to higher quality and lower prices. That is the premise behind the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges. A necessary condition for this to work, however, is that patients have visibility into the quality and…
There are numerous value frameworks being developed by an alphabet soup of organizations including ACC/AHA, ASCO, ICER, MSKCC, NCCN, and others. These organizations generally represent providers or payer perspective on value. But what does “value” mean to patients? The National Patient Advocate Foundation (PAF) provides their thoughts in a recent white paper titled “The Roadmap to…
Are urban or rural physician practices more likely to adopt electronic medical records (EMR)? The answer is suprrising. A paper by Whitacre (2016) finds the following: Overall practice-level EMR adoption rates generally increase with the degree of rurality and range from 47 percent in the most urban counties to over 60 percent in the most…
A study titled “Estimating the Value of New Technologies That Provide More Accurate Drug Adherence Information to Providers for Their Patients with Schizophrenia” was just published in the November edition of JMCP. This is work with co-authors Taylor T. Schwartz, Darius N. Lakdawalla, and Felicia M. Forma. The abstract is below. Go check it out! …
According to a recent study in JAMA, the answer may be no. High-deductible health plans aim to not only reduce the use of unnecessary services, but to make consumers more price sensitive and search for high quality, low priced care. The latter goal, however, depends crucially on whether patients have access to information on accurate…
Machine learning programs have made dramatic steps in recent years. For instance, AlphaGo beat a world champion Go player recently. Playing games is great, but can machine learning improve health care? Science Daily reports that machine learning algorithms may help improve cancer screening accuracy. Every state in the United States requires cancer cases to be…
Nature has an interesting article on how mobile technology is being used to treat mental illness. Estimates suggest that about 29% of people will experience a mental disorder in their lifetime1. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that many of those people — up to 55% in developed countries and 85% in developing…
In a nutshell those are the comments made in January by Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt at the J.P. Morgan Annual Health Care Conference. The Meaningful Use program as it has existed, will now be effectively over… You can now hear physicians groups burdened by the inflexible EMR mandate rejoicing. But then Slavitt continues. and replaced with…
Sources of health care data are proliferating. The previous standard–medical charts–are being augmented with information from digital sensors, patient reported outcomes, and genetic information. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all that information in one place? That is what Salesforce is thinking. Fortune reports: Salesforce announced on Wednesday a new patient relationship management platform that…
Here at the Healthcare Economist, I have noted that electronic medical records (EMR) are not the cure-all for healthcare delivery. EMRs have a number of problems in and of themselves. However, I do certainly acknowledge that going from a medical alphabet (see below) to a regular old English alphabet is a huge advance. …