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Source: The Health Care Blog

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Total 204 results found since Jan 2013.

Very Bad Numbers
By ANISH KOKA, MD The date is July 17th, 2014. It is 10am in the Dirksen Senate building, and the congressional subcommittee on health and aging is about to focus on patient harm. The educating will be done by some of the leaders in the medical field, Ashish Jha and Tejal Gandhi from Harvard, Peter Pronovost from Johns Hopkins. The star of the proceedings is John James, a toxicologist, a PhD from Texas, and the founder of Patient Safety America. The tone is set from the beginning by none other than Bernie Sanders. In somber tones, he relays that hospitals can make patients worse, and that a recent study suggests medical er...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 30, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs

How to Safeguard your Career in Treacherous Healthcare Times
By MICHEL ACCAD, MD Dear medical student, I am honored by the opportunity to offer some advice on how to safeguard your professional career in a treacherous healthcare system. I will not elaborate on why I think the healthcare system is “treacherous.”  I will assume—and even hope—that you have at least some inkling that things are not so rosy in the world of medicine. I am also not going to give any actual advice.  I’m a fan of Socrates, so I believe that it is more constructive to challenge you with pointed questions.  The real advice will come to you naturally as you proceed to answer these questions for you...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 25, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Simon Nath Tags: THCB MICHEL ACCAD Source Type: blogs

A Radical Policy Proposal: Go Easy On Older Docs
By DIANE EVANS Through Dec. 15, federal regulators will accept public comments on the next set of rules that will shape the future of medicine in the transition to a super information highway for Electronic Health Records (EHRs).  For health providers, this is a time to speak out. One idea:  Why not suggest options to give leniency to older doctors struggling with the shift to technology late in their careers? By the government’s own estimate,in a report on A 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure, a fully functioning EHR system, for the cross-sharing of health records among providers, ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 23, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Simon Nath Tags: THCB Diane Evans Source Type: blogs

The Doctor- Patient Relationship and the Outcomes Movement
By MICHEL ACCAD, MD In a recent Harvard Business Review article, authors Erin Sullivan and Andy Ellner take a stand against the “outcomes theory of value,” advanced by such economists as Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan who believe that in order to “properly manage value, both outcomes and cost must be measured at the patient level.” In contrast, Sullivan and Ellner point out that medical care is first of all a matter of relationships: With over 50% of primary care providers believing that efforts to measure quality-related outcomes actually make quality worse, it seems there may be something missing from the e...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 4, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB MICHEL ACCAD Source Type: blogs

How Doctors Became Subcontractors
By MICHEL ACCAD, MD In our healthcare system, the “middleman” is not who you think During my recent podcast interview with Jeff Deist, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, I remarked that third-party payers are not, in fact, intermediaries between doctors and patients. In reality, it is the physician who has become a “middleman” in the healthcare transaction or, as I argued, a subcontractor to the insurer. Important as it is, this reality is not well recognized—not even by physicians—because when doctors took on this “role” in the late 1980’s, the process by which healthcare busine...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 30, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Simon Nath Tags: THCB MICHEL ACCAD Source Type: blogs

Right Care Action Week – What can Radiologists do?
By SAURABH JHA, MD The Lown Institute advocates rational use of medical resources. This is a noble goal and worthy of the attention of radiologists. This week is the right care action week. Here are five simple things any radiologist can do this week, and the following weeks. This will improve patient care by avoiding unnecessary tests. Speak to the referring clinician, at least sometimes, if not often, perhaps twice a day. The conversation need not be adversarial. Ask before the imaging two simple questions. What will you do if the test is positive? What will you do if the test is negative? Inquire four weeks after the im...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 20, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Simon Nath Tags: THCB Saurabh Jha Source Type: blogs

What Cardiologists Can Teach Economists
By MICHEL ACCAD, MD I had the great fortune and pleasure of studying under the late Kanu Chatterjee during my cardiology fellowship at the University of California San Francisco. In the early 1970’s, Dr. Chatterjee was among the first to understand the benefits of “afterload reduction” for the treatment of congestive heart failure: Prior to that time, giving medications that could lower the blood pressure was often seen as heretical.  In fact, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, the treatment of heart failure sometimes consisted in applying measures to raise the blood pressure and increase the work of the heart. The...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 14, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Simon Nath Tags: THCB MICHEL ACCAD Source Type: blogs

Is ProPublica the Paul Revere of Transparency?
By SAURABH JHA, MD Recently, I was speaking with a “less is more” advocate. He used his superior knowledge of statistics – he had an MPH – to debunk randomized controlled trials. We discussed overdiagnosis, overtreatment, and the shakiness of medical sciences. We spoke about measuring the quality of physicians. I remarked that quality metrics have as much evidence as Garcinia Cambogia – we had just laughed about Dr. Oz. I expected a chuckle. Instead, he became distinctly uncomfortable and, in a solemn tone, lectured me about the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, “To Err is Human.” The physician, a bulld...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 11, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs

Will Watson Replace Radiologists? Ask a Radiologist.
By ANDY DeLaO Back in August, 2015 IBM announced their bid to acquire Merge Healthcare for $1B dollars. (Forbes article here) Merge is a product that helps to manage, store, report, and bill for the medical images of patients as read by Radiologists.   (More here) Today between the 7500 Merge customers they have access to roughly 30 billion images. The promise for Watson Health is to learn how to “see” through machine learning from the vast amount of medical images that Merge Healthcare manages. Currently, Watson reads 66 million pages a second. It is predicted by IBM researchers that 90% of all “Big Dat...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 6, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Simon Nath Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs

Private Medicine in India is No Free Market
By MICHEL ACCAD, MD On the surface, the proposition that medical care in India is a free market seems plausible. Setting aside the perennially underfunded public healthcare system, there is a large second tier system where patients get care without any apparent oversight. Sure, laws and rules abound, but these are easily overcome with bribes paid to bureaucrats. A “cost of doing business,” you might say. In that private system, the care rendered is up to the doctor and patient, and the terms of the transaction are simply decided on the basis of cash exchanging hands. What could be more free market than that? A libertar...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 1, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs

ACA Database: The Doctor Is a Monopoly
By THCBist Undisclosed location, TN writes: I have a concern that some of the medical specialty groups of physicans in my area are forming their own monopolies. They are joining together in a way that patients can no longer have access to a new physician if they feel they are not getting the care they need or are not comfortable with the physician they chose. The [ name withheld ] or [ withheld ] Tn. is one of those groups. I had been seeing one of their physicians for a number of years and had wanted to try someone else for a long time before I actually tried.  I was told that I could not see any other physician in the ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - September 11, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs

Cholesterol Drugs: New Studies Could Spur Even Wider Use. Is That a Good Thing?
By STEVEN FINDLAY Chances are that a third of you reading this sentence take a statin, the ubiquitous cholesterol-lowering drugs. I do. Is it a good or bad thing that so many of us are taking these meds? Two studies out this month advance the long-running debate about the widespread use of statins—and they could propel doctors to prescribe the drugs to millions more people. The cholesterol/statin story starts in the early 1980s. Here’s a quick summary: By 1985, studies showed conclusively that statins (the best known one then was Mevacor/lovastatin) substantially reduced the risk of another heart attack in people who ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 27, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: suchandan roy Tags: THCB LDl Lipitor Statins Steven Findlay Source Type: blogs

A Declaration of Data Independence Through the Lens of the Patient
By BRIAN AHIER This weekend is not only independence day in the US, it’s the culmination of a patient-led uprising to demand that providers hand over their medical data. To that end I & THCB are supporting Health Data Independence Day. Sign the petition at GetMyHealthData.org and please use and encourage others to use the free tool from the associated Vocatus Project to request your data from your doctors and hospitals. I’ll be taking up the cudgels in the continuing story of my son’s “Search for Intr-Aero-Bili-Ty” but for now we’re thrilled to publish this amazing piece from Health...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 3, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs

The ABIM Controversy: A Brief History of Board Certification and MOC
By ROBERT WACHTER, MD What’s up with the ABIM?” “I just got a note about an alternative board. Should I join it?” “Aren’t you glad to be off the Board?” These days, I get these questions from friends and colleagues regularly. When I first joined the board of directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) in 2004, the organization was a well-respected pillar of American medicine. Today the organization finds itself in a fight for its life, being painted as everything from out of touch to money-hungry to, more recently, corrupt. I just completed my decade-long service to the ABIM and, more recentl...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 2, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB ABIM Source Type: blogs