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general

US Health Care Reform: A Contemporary Example of
Goodhart’s Law?

Goodhart’s law – named after a former chief economist of the Bank of England – says that whatever social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure you adopt as a financial target ceases to be a relevant target once you have adopted it because it loses the information content it had originally. What is the [...]

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ethics, general, hc's problem list, medical records, news & gossip, policy issues

Dossia, Microsoft HealthVault & Google Health:
Illegal in NJ?

In the last few days the announcement of a proposed NJ state law has made the Internet rounds. “· On or after January 1, 2011, no person or entity is permitted to sell, offer for sale, give, furnish, or otherwise distribute to any person or entity in this State a health information technology product that [...]

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general, 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, [...]

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general, 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 [...]

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found on the net

Patients first. Doctors second.

An Op-Ed piece at the healthcare blog, written by 2 MDs from Harvard Medical School is pretty clear! For those of us who believe the time has come for participatory medicine, the following quote is particularly interesting: Empowering patients should be the first step in transforming American healthcare. The central question that policy makers should [...]

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general, policy issues, pt/doc co-care, reforming hc, trends & principles

When is “Information Therapy” Simply Learning?

I sometimes wonder whether we complicate things that are pretty simple, by assigning more labels and new terms to things that have perfectly good labels already. For instance, I once thought I knew what “information therapy” meant. It meant a doctor or other healthcare professional “prescribed” certain information for you to read, so you could [...]

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