e-CareManagement blog

Chronic Disease Management • Technology • Strategy • Issues and Trends

Archive for March, 2009

Stand for Quality Group: “Link HIT Investment to Quality Improvement”

On March 24, Stand for Quality — a new group representing 165 diverse health care organizations — called for a new era of quality in health care. Their white paper is titled Building a Foundation for High Quality, Affordable Health Care: Linking Performance Measurement to Health Reform .
The perspectives [...]

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Can Cats Think Outside the Box? Here’s a Role Model.

Even though I am a self-admitted dog person, Hoover is my buddy.
Hoover got a new shoebox as a Christmas present.  While most cats are very tied to their existing surroundings and don’t like things to change, Hoover is not your average cat.
The following photos were taken over about a two week period. Hoover hopes you [...]

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Wait and See: What’s Unclear or To-Be-Determined (TBD) About HITECH.

Sometimes laws are passed and the statute itself represents 95% of the work — there aren’t many details to figure out or loose ends to tidy up.
That isn’t the case with HITECH. The HITECH statute is just the beginning.
Whether you’re a cat or a dog, you’ll have hopes and fears about aspects of HITECH that are unclear or yet to-be-determined (TBD).
These [...]

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Feline Foot-Dragging: Three Non-Innovative Aspects of HITECH

What do cats (incumbent EHR vendors and their supporters) have to smile about over HITECH?
A lot.
…and it’s not very complicated.  HITECH directs $17 B to the cat community, and leaves scraps for the dogs.
(As a refresher, the cat POV is that HITECH stimulus funds should simply pay directly for electronic health record (EHR) technology [...]

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Landmark Report: “The Promise of Care Coordination” in Medicare

Download a copy here .  Excerpts from the Executive Summary:
Effective Interventions
Three types of interventions have been demonstrated to be effective in reducing hospitalizations for Medicare beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions who in general are not cognitively impaired:

Transitional care interventions in which patients are first engaged while in the hospital and then followed intensively [...]

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Dogged Optimism: Five Innovative Aspects of HITECH

If you’re a dog (an innovator), what’s there to smile about over HITECH?  Quite a bit.
In the first post of this series, I suggested that HITECH favors cats by about 60/40 and noted that the single most cat-like feature of HITECH is providing incentives for physicians and hospitals to acquire and implement EHRs  — [...]

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Will HITECH Lead to Innovation? The Continuing Cat/Dog Dialogue

Will the recently passed HITECH legislation — the federal stimulus funding for health IT — encourage innovation?  or will it lock in outdated electronic health record (EHR) technology?
It’s a mixed bag — HITECH legislation  is both dog-like (innovative) and catlike (protecting incumbents).  I’ll refresh your memory below on more specific definitions of cats and dogs.
Among many other reasons, HITECH [...]

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How Much Health-Related Productivity Loss is Really Avoidable? And Why Should I Care??

by John E. Riedel
Study breaks new ground in calculating the "normal impairment factor."
We know that poor health accounts for a considerable amount of productivity loss-anywhere from 1 ½ to 3 times direct medical costs.  The potential for disease prevention and disease management programs to reduce productivity loss has, for obvious reasons, caught the [...]

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HITECH Overlap: Medical Home, Telehealth, Health IT/Exchange

What’s the commonality among Medical Home, Telehealth, and Health IT/Information Exchange initiatives?
They all relate to care coordination.  As shown in the diagram below from the Kansas Health Policy Authority (KHPA), there’s a lot of overlap.

A larger copy of the slide is available in this March 2 PowerPoint presentation by Marcia Neilsen , Executive Director, KHPA.
What [...]

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