March 5th, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
Tags: Claims Processing, Health Insurance, Healthcare reform, Managed Care, Rationing, Sibelius
1 Comment »
DrRich is pleased to note that events have so quickly confirmed the explanation he gave, in his last post, regarding what the health insurance companies are up to by choosing to massively increase insurance premiums at this critical juncture. The insurance companies, to repeat, are willfully embracing their assigned role as “villain,” in order to get apparently stalled healthcare reforms back on track.
A mere few hours after DrRich had posted, Kathleen Sibelius issued a press release angrily documenting several additional requests for large rate increases by health insurance companies all across the land, and pointedly reminding us regular folks that healthcare reform would prevent these greedy companies from committing such abusive and harmful acts. And thus has the administration now officially established runaway health insurance premiums as the crisis of the moment. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
March 4th, 2010 by JessicaBerthold in Better Health Network, Opinion
Tags: Delirium, Measures, Metrics, Neurohospitalist, Neurology, Quality
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Quality and safety metrics that will specifically affect neurologists/neurohospitalists are coming in the next few years, and neurohospitalists need to be involved in the discussion of what those metrics are, warned S. Andrew Josephson of USCF during a neurohospitalists session at the Stroke 2010 conference yesterday.
He urged the audience to consider the current metric of “time to antibiotics administration for pneumonia,” which seems like a reasonable quality metric on the surface. To get compliance rates up, many hospitals give antibiotics to anyone with a little sputum, a cough, a fever, etc., as soon as he/she arrives at the ED. Thus, resistance rates have risen along with administration rates, because people are getting the drugs when they have things like bronchitis, not just pneumonia. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
March 4th, 2010 by GruntDoc in Better Health Network, Opinion
Tags: ACEP, Board Certification, Emergency Medicine, Patient Safety, Quality
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The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) describes itself as:
Welcome to the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) public website. ABEM certifies qualifying physicians who specialize in Emergency Medicine and is a member board of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). ABMS certification is sought and earned by physicians on a voluntary basis. ABEM and other ABMS member boards certify only those physicians who meet high educational, professional standing, and examination standards. ABEM and other ABMS member boards are not membership associations.
The thing I’d like to bring your attention to is that it’s a Voluntary organization. For a voluntary organization they’re adding lots of requirements without asking members… Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
March 4th, 2010 by Dr. Val Jones in Expert Interviews, News, Opinion, Video
Tags: #HIMSS10, ABC, Dr. Val, GE, HIMSS, Panasonic, RadarFind, Social Media, Twitter
2 Comments »
HIMSS 2010 is the largest Health IT conference of the year. I spent the last 3 days interviewing exhibitors in Atlanta about what’s hot in healthcare. For this segment I Skyped in to ABC News in DC to discuss some of the most interesting gadgets that I discovered during my interview process. The segment was short, so I only had the chance to present 3 devices: the Panasonic Tough Book, the GE Vscan, and Radar Find’s RFID tags.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDGYwm3ty20
March 3rd, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, Opinion
Tags: Coordination, Facebook, Georgraphy, Google Maps, Groundcrew, Location, Schedules, Social Media, Twitter
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Jay Parkinson has recently found a nice service that is in beta version now. It’s called Groundcrew and lets you organize people in real time by combining the power of Google Maps with your online communities and friends such as Twitter of Facebook. For example, I would like to organize free lectures about DNA in order to educate people living in my neighborhood about genomics and health. It’s not that easy to find people around my home but this tool lets me spread the word easily and manage all the people who join the live feed of the event.
Give it a try and see how the demo works.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
