Health Insurers & the Affordable Care Act: Extinction or Reinvention?
By KENT BOTTLES, MD
Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), health insurers are scrambling to reinvent themselves for a new era. In an earlier post, I quoted Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini as saying he wants to create a business model that makes sense under the new rules and regulations. In a recent speech Bertolini explained, “We need to move the system from underwriting risk to managing populations. We want to have a different relationship with the providers, physicians and hospitals we do business with.” Read more. In God We Trust. All Others Must Bring Data.
By BOB WACHTER, MD
I knew it would happen sooner or later, and earlier this week it finally did.
In 2003 US News & World Report pronounced my hospital, UCSF Medical Center, the 7th best in the nation. That same year, Medicare launched its Hospital Compare website. For the first time, quality measures for patients with pneumonia, heart failure, and heart attack were now instantly available on the Internet. While we performed well on many of the Medicare measures, we were mediocre on some. And on one of them – the percent of hospitalized pneumonia patients who received pneumococcal vaccination prior to discharge – we were abysmal, getting it right only 10% of the time. Read More.
See One. Do One. Harm One?
By PETER PRONOVOST, MD
I recently cared for Ms. K, an elderly black woman who had been sitting in the intensive care unit for more than a month. She was, frail, weak and intermittently delirious, with a hopeful smile. She had a big problem: She had undergone an esophagectomy at an outside hospital and suffered a horrible complication, leading her to be transferred to The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Ms. K had a large hole in her posterior trachea, far too large to directly fix, extending from her vocal cords to where her trachea splits into right and left bronchus. She had a trachea tube so she can breathe, and her esophagus was tied off high in her throat so oral secretions containing bacteria did not fall through the hole and infect her heart and lungs. It is unclear if she will survive, and the costs of her medical care will be in the millions. Read More. Who Owns a Patient’s Health Information?
By FRED TROTTER
·The patient to whom it refers?
·The health provider that created it?
·The IT specialist who has the greatest control over it?
The notion of ownership is inadequate for health information. For instance, no one has an absolute right to destroy health information. But we all understand what it means to own an automobile: You can drive the car you own into a tree or into the ocean if you want to. No one has the legal right to do things like that to a “master copy” of health information.
All of the groups above have a complex series of rights and responsibilities relating to health information that should never be trivialized into ownership. Read more.
The Destructiveness of Measures
By DR. WES
A little box pops up before him asking if he asked the patient about the exercise. He mumbles something under his breath, clicks a little box beneath the question, then moves on.
This is what medicine has become: a series of computer queries and measures of clicks. It must be measurable, quantifiable, and justifiable or it didn’t happen.
Do they ask if I asked them about if they used cocaine? Of course not: too politically incorrect.
Do they ask if I really listened to their heart? Of course not – this activity is not a paid activity.
Do they ask about the myriad of phone calls and e-mails to arrange for a procedure? Nope. Read More.
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