general
David Kibbe & Mark Leavitt : Openness vs. Opacity
Background information: The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) is currently in a monopolistic situation since it is, for the last few years, the only entity allowed to certify EHRs. The HITECH act of ARRA mentions specifically the requirement to use “certified” EHRs to be able to collect federal money to implement EHR at [...]
Read Morefound on the net
Getting health insurance with a pre-existing condition
Thanks to Amy Tenderich (@DiabetesMine) for mentioning this CNN Empowered Patient entry that could be of real use to many: “Tips for getting insurance when you have a pre-existing condition ” The tips:
Read Moreethics, general, hc's problem list, news & gossip, policy issues, reforming hc, trends & principles
Atul Gawande examines why health costs are high some places and lower others
As soon as you can, stop what you’re doing and devote 20-30 minutes to reading Atul Gawande’s important new article in the June 1 New Yorker, The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. I don’t claim to be an expert about cost issues but in my year-plus of listening [...]
Read Morept/doc co-care, pts as teachers, reforming hc
Adopting a Style for Improved Health Outcomes
Not Your Father’s Doctor-Patient Relationship – A Positively Revolutionary Approach In pediatrics, research has shown that not all parenting styles produce equal outcomes. Researchers often categorize parenting styles into four groups according to parents’ level of expectations for their children and their level of empathy, their responsiveness to their children’s cues. What would high expectations [...]
Read Moregeneral
X PRIZE Blog Rally:
$10M for Health Care Innovators
Scott Shreeve, MD, Senior Health Advisor at The X Prize Foundation and frequent THCB contributor, has asked the health care blogosphere to take part in this blog rally in order to raise awareness about the Healthcare X Prize Foundation competition and encourage public participation in the prize design. Pass the word around and feel free to post [...]
Read Morepositive patterns, pt/doc co-care, trends & principles
The power of listening and being heard
This is a special occasion for me, a guest post by Dr. Louise Glaser. Louise is a pediatrician in the Kaiser Permanente system, where among other things she’s Chief of Leadership and Communication Development in the Sacramento area. I met her a year ago at the annual Conference for Global Transformation (CGT), and again this [...]
Read Morenews & gossip, pt/doc co-care, trends & principles
Another great reason to be a participatory e-patient
The Boston Globe had a brief interview with me last Monday, and commenter “MikeScanlon” gave a great additional reason to go “e”: Doctors are required to respond to a lot of things – health insurance requirements, liability insurance requirements, rules and regulations of all sort – and finally, the assumptions about their patients that they [...]
Read Moregeneral, hc's problem list, news & gossip, trends & principles
Will The Great Recession Create Millions of e-Patients?
Another post about healthcare “creepware” from Opaque, Inc. While reading the Wall Street Journal health blog, I saw this disturbing piece of information: In a new survey conducted by Mercer, the employee benefits consulting shop, nearly half of the 428 employers polled said they plan to shift more health costs to employees in 2010. Further, [...]
Read Moregeneral
Participatory Medicine: What Is It For You?
As the meme is now firmly accepted, I thought we ought to have another round of definition crowdsourcing. If you use the term please stop here for a minute and let us know what it means to you. I will summarize the responses and use the results to update the wikipedia page on Participatory Medicine. [...]
Read Moregeneral, medical records, policy issues, reforming hc, trends & principles
Meaningful Use: The Elephant IS In The Room
Comparative Effectiveness: a comparison of the impact of different options that are available for treating a given medical condition for a particular set of patients. Such studies may compare similar treatments, such as competing drugs, or they may analyze very different approaches, such as surgery and drug therapy. The analysis may focus only on the [...]
Read More


