Testimony submitted to the Meaningful Use workgroup (and an urgent call for citizen participation)

April 16, 2010 · Filed Under Why PM, e-pts resources, medical records, policy issues, pt/doc co-care, reforming hc · 13 Comments

There’s an important call to action below. If you care about making healthcare more responsive to us, and less responsive to vendors, please read to the end. This is short.

Thanks to all of you who submitted comments on this week’s post, offering feedback. Here is the PDF I submitted today, which is being distributed to all members of the Meaningful Use workgroup.

Full text of original comments received here by the deadline were included in Appendix A, along with a link to that post so interested readers can see subsequent discussion and any later comments. Keep ‘em coming!

Want to know how cool this community is? We had several times more responses on this subject than were received by the similar post on The Healthcare Blog – and none of theirs had actual feedback! (Just the usual THCB kvetching.:–))

More importantly, consider how vital this work is. To quote from Matthew Holt’s post over there: Read more

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

June 29, 2009 · Filed Under general · 17 Comments

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 risk that, as soon as the health care system reform becomes an intense focus of policy (as it is now), more and more attention will get devoted, not to controlling health care spending, but to continuing to spend while finding reasons why what was just spent does not form part of what could/should be reformed? Based on the developments of last 2 weeks, including the huge fight over the real cost of the proposed reform and the continuing discussion over Atul Gawande’s masterful article, “The Cost Conundrum” , my guess is that we are heading straight into Goodhart’s kingdom. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics make a comment in a blog post about health care?

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