Industry News
Ten Things You Hate About Your EMR (Healthcare IT News, 10/06/11)
3. It doesn’t provide the basics. LinkedIn user David McCartney, CFO at Center Street Community Health Center, has issues with certain systems and their inability to generate basic reports.
(People tell us one thing they like about ProtoHIT is that they can use it as a basic EMR system for workers’ comp. And, we provide standard reports online, anytime.)
Steve Jobs’ Legacy Will Live On In Healthcare (Healthcare IT News, 10/06/11) ”Just this week, at the launch of the new iPhone 4S, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that ’80 percent of the top hospitals in the U.S. are now testing or piloting the iPad’ – using the device ‘to access patient records, to review medical images, to administer bedside care.’
Doctors Turn To Tablet Computers (San Francisco Chronicle, 09/26/11)
California: Workers’ comp saw underwriting loss of $1.6 billion in 2010 (Risk & Insurance, 07/29/11). “Medical continued to be the priciest factor in the workers’ comp system and was up to $3.7 billion from $3.6 billion. While physician reimbursement comprised the biggest share, pharmacy saw the biggest increase—up 6.2 percent to $361 million.”
Managed Care Creeps Into The Doctor’s Office (NPR’s health blog, 7/11) “…managed care companies are getting into the business of running physician groups to keep costs down, as Kaiser Health News reported over the weekend.”
That Used to Be Comp (Jon L. Gelman, Workers’ Compensation blog, 07/21/11). Comments on workers’ comp from Thomas Friedman at the National Governor’s Convention a week earlier.
The State workers’ compensation system, crafted over one hundred years ago, in the time of the American Industrial Revolution, no longer functions as an efficient, remedial and expeditious method for the handling of disability claims. Traumatic events have given way to multifaceted occupational diseases, the simplicity of single stage medical treatment protocols have multiplied into complex and costly: diagnostics, treatment modalities, and pharmaceutical regiments, that are accentuated with personalized genetic modeling.
WCRI study highlights variations in narcotics use among comp systems (Risk & Insurance, 07/21/11). Many physicians who prescribe narcotics for injured workers have not followed medical treatment guidelines for monitoring their patients, according to a new study.
Health Is the Health of the State (Christopher J. Conover, The American, 07/19/11). Between 1966 and 2007, the entire increase in the size of government relative to the economy resulted from growth in tax-financed health spending.
We need more than “checklists” to guarantee patient safety (John S. Toussaint, MD, ThedaCare Center for HealthCare Value—blog, 07/05/11). Much has been written recently about using checklists to deliver patient safety results. However, this won’t work unless other key components of a management system are in place.
The deficit deal’s impact on workers comp (Joseph Paduda, Managed Care Matters—blog, 07/05/11). What happens in Medicaid and Medicare affects work comp via cost-shifting, fee schedule changes, reimbursement rules, and altered provider practice patterns.
$10 Million in Affordable Care Act funds to help create workplace health programs (U.S. Dept. Health & Human Services, 06/23/11). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced today the availability of $10 million to establish and evaluate comprehensive workplace health promotion programs across the nation to improve the health of American workers and their families.
How You Can Help Reduce the Cost of Medical Care (Industry Week, 06/22/11) Ralph Keller, president of the AME Institute and former president of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence notes:
It’s clear we all have a stake in the escalating cost of health care. The question is: What can we do about it? As continuous improvement (CI) practitioners, I believe there is much that lean manufacturers can do, and we need to follow others who have led the way.
Medical Cost Inflation Solved (Peter Rousmaniere, Risk & Insurance, 06/01/11). Four essential strategies, visible in at least one state and among a handful of workers’ compensation claims payers, cry out for adoption by many:
1. Solve the public health crisis of the overuse of opioid (narcotic) pain medication…
2. Make public the adverse effects of a very small share of physicians who engage in aggressive use of opioids and other controversial treatments…
3. Invest in medical intelligence to develop a “supply chain” of preferred clinicians to address chronic pain issues…
4. Buy in to very close monitoring, intervention and referral… to severely cutting down on unnecessary surgeries … and injection-happy doctoring.
Pascal: “All of Men’s Troubles Stem From…” (Maggie Mahar, Health Beat—blog, 05/10/11). The author reviews the challenges of relying solely on evidence-based medicine.
EHR reminders can help docs avoid unnecessary treatments (Maureen McKinney, Modern Healthcare.com, 04/18/11).
Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital built automated alerts into the hospital’s electronic health-record system to determine whether they would help physicians adhere to recently updated guidelines for ordering red blood-cell transfusions. The system alerted physicians ordering red blood-cell transfusions whenever a patient did not meet the clinical criteria for receiving the procedure. Researchers determined that the reminders prevented 460 unnecessary transfusions, for a total cost savings of $165,000 over one year.
Order sets are stupid, IMO (Rick Frea, Respitory Therapy Cave—blog, 03/25/11)
Order sets, which started with the intention of doing what is best by best practice medicine, generally make it so each patient is treated the same. Order sets take away personal accountability, individual thought, personal accountability and responsibility… Protocols increase personal accountability and responsibility. Protocols increase personal thought and intellectuality. Protocols preach individuality.
From ‘Cookbook’ to Evidence-Based Medicine (Philip Betbeze, Health Leaders Media, 03/04/11). The key to making evidence-based medicine and other treatment guidelines useful is measuring outcomes data.
The Technology Patch for Health Care Woes (Jeff Hawley, Open Advantage, 02/14/11).
There are several steps that modern technology can take to begin to improve the efficiency and the outcomes of our healthcare system, and they begin with data. Retail and online merchants have perfected data management—the concept of capturing and storing the purchases we make, the items we view online, and all other interactions and putting this information to use to make recommendations and targeted offers. Those data and analytics practices hold strong potential for the healthcare industry as well … All of this begins with capturing the data. You can’t analyze what you don’t know, and the task of capturing the data will involve encouraging increased use of electronic health records and an attempt to transition the healthcare industry to a more paperless environment … The move towards evidence-based medicine is facilitated by analyzing data from disparate sources and combined with data analytics, provides a data-rich environment for effective decision making.
The Safety Checklist (Steven Novell, Science Based Medicine blog, 02/02/11).
The checklist trend represents a culture change within medicine – and a good one … It seems that we have pushed the limits of training. Medicine has become highly technical, specialized, and complex. While extensive training is necessary, it is no longer sufficient to minimize risk. We are now entering the age of the checklist. This is a simple procedure that can significantly improve human performance. The latest study is further evidence in support of this.
Guidelines – beyond the soundbite and marketing hype (Joseph Paduda, Managed Care Matters—blog, 01/14/11).
If you’re trying to get more scientific about how you practice medicine or what services/procedures/drugs/treatments you pay for, you are likely relying on clinical guidelines to help provide a little more perspective, hopefully one based on something other than best guess or generally accepted knowledge or tribal wisdom.
A recent study may well give you pause – the key finding is rather alarming - many guidelines are NOT based on solid research, but on work that is kindly described as rather more superficial.