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Megatrend Spotting: Health Plan Role of Having “Best Data About YOUR Medical Conditions” is Up for Grabs

Who has the most comprehensive data about YOUR clinical conditions?

For most people, the answer today is “your health plan”, but it’s not at all clear that health plans will continue to have this role in the future.

As physicians and hospitals adopt EHRs, it’s foreseeable that clinical data about patients will be far more available and accessible.

Will patient data become:

A jockeying point for control and business advantage between health plans and care providers,
A collaborative opportunity to optimize clinical care and care […]

Overview: Here Come Stages 2 and 3 of HITECH!

 

We’ve spent the past year creating the MU (meaningful use) requirements for Stage 1 of the HITECH act.  As shown by the diagram above, Stage 1 focuses on Data Capture and Sharing. Now it’s time to begin to focus on Stage 2 (Advanced Clinical Processes) and Stage 3 (Improved Outcomes).

The current generation of EMRs (electronic medical records) were designed primarily to assist care providers with clinical documentation, billing, and maximizing revenues. They were not designed to enable care coordination and […]

Digital Medical Office of the Future Conference. Las Vegas, Sept. 9-10

CLICK HERE FOR THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE

Healthcare providers face critical choices in selecting and implementing Electronic Health Records (EHRs). In addition, physicians and hospitals will need to develop the capacity to exchange clinical information in order to meet Meaningful Use requirements. This program will offer detailed and practical information on EHR selection and implementation, as well as strategies for creating a sustainable health information exchange (HIE). The program also features sessions on legal/regulatory issues, clinical platforms and applications as […]

91% of Citizens Want All Their Healthcare Data Stored in One Place, in an EHR…

…Australian citizens, that is…not U.S. citizens.  See Dr. David Moore’s writeup in Australian Health Information Technology.

Of course, you’d never see this type broad support for centralized EHRs in the U.S.

Is this good or bad? You can decide for yourself…but at the very least this caught my attention as illustrating communitarian vs. individualistic tendencies in different world nations.

 

A Manifesto for Healthcare’s Disruptive Innovation of the Decade: Open EHR Technology Platform(s) and Ecosystem

fyi, here’s a copy of my PowerPoint presentation at today’s Healthcare Unbound conference.

The Twitter hashtag for the event is #HCU10.

Medicare MAPCP Medical Home Demo: CMS Kicks Sands in the States’ Faces

by Jaan Sidorov, MD and Vince Kuraitis

The Medicare MAPCP (Multi-Payer Advanced Primary Care Practice) demo promised to be Medicare’s Biggest Change in 40 Years…

…but the emerging reality isn’t living up to the promise.

In this post, we’ll discuss:

The Promise
An Overview of the MAPCP Demo
Our Main Takeaway: Emerging Reality Suggests Medicare Will Be a “Difficult” Partner
Conclusion: Think Twice Before Signing Up

1) The Promise

The sandbox metaphor was first used by the National Academy for State Health Policy:

For the 10 or more […]

16 Capabilities Physicians Will Need to Implement New Payment Models

(click on the graphic to download the document)

Depending on the nature of the payment changes which are made, physicians may need to enhance their capabilities in some or all of the following sixteen areas:

Achieving sufficient patient volume to support a new or improved service.
Having sufficient upfront capital to design and implement a new or improved service.
Having the skills/experience to efficiently/effectively implement a new/improved service.
Having the ability to obtain and analyze data on the quality of services.
Having the skills/experience to […]

Is HITECH Working? #7: Where’s Plan B? Congress and ONC need to address major flaws in HITECH.

by Vince Kuraitis JD, MBA and David C. Kibbe MD, MBA

Pop quiz: Among early-stage companies that are successful, what percentage are successful with the initial business model with which they started (Plan A) vs. a secondary business model (Plan B)?

Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen studied this issue.  He found that among successful companies, only 7% succeeded with their initial business model, while 93% evolved into a different business model.

So let’s take this finding and reexamine our human nature. In light of these statistics, […]

Nuggets

The Emerging Market in Health Care Innovation
Tilman Ehrbeck, Nicolaus Henke, and Thomas Kibasi
McKinsey Quarterly May 2010
McKinsey conducted research in partnership with the World Economic Forum to study the most promising novel forms of health care delivery and, in particular, to understand how these innovations changed its economics.

The Delineation of Home Healthcare: The Natural Evolution of a Healthy Industry
Wyatt Matas & Associates (investment bankers), April 2010
This whitepaper discusses the opportunity for home healthcare to become the center of chronic care disease […]

Is HITECH Working? #6: HITECH and Health Reform Objectives are Synergistic

by Vince Kuraitis JD, MBA and David C. Kibbe MD, MBA

.

….or to be more specific, HITECH is synergistic with payment reform that could come from the recently passed national health care reform legislation — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

We’ll keep this post fairly short and try to avoid many of the more divisive aspects of this topic. The need for healthcare payment reform is well understood on both sides of the aisle:

Realizing the full potential of health IT depends in […]