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Disease Management Going Mobile & Retail: QUALCOMM’s Health Care MVNO
An article in Wireless Week announces the creation of a new species: a health care MVNO named LifeComm. LifeComm promises to move disease management, wellness, and fitness into new territories.
What is a MVNO?
More acronyms! What is a MVNO? A Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) is a mobile operator that does not own its own spectrum and usually does not have its own network infrastructure. Instead, MVNOs have business arrangements with traditional mobile operators to buy minutes of use (MOU) for sale to their […]
Motherhood, Empty Nesting, and Disease Management
My wife, Jill, just wrote a beautiful Mother’s Day essay. Her writing brought a tear to my eye.
What does this have to do with disease management? Nothing, really….well, actually I could use a disease management program targeted at dads who have the condition of having recently become empty nesters.
Vince
European vs U.S. Primary Care: We Have Things Backwards
The status of primary care is dramatically different in Europe vs. the U.S.
While doing background reading, I was startled by the title of a book: “Primary care in the driver’s seat? Organisational reform in European primary care” The book was reviewed in the International Journal of Integrated Care .
Is primary care capable of taking a dominant role in running the whole health care system? This challenging question is what makes this book interesting and takes the debate one step ahead […]
Evidence for Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM): The Glass is More than Half Full
Over the years, there have been a number of meta-analyses examining hundreds of studies relating to effectiveness of RPM. The latest one of these is Systematic Review of Home Telemonitoring for Chronic Diseases: The Evidence Base, published in the May/June 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).
My colleague Tim Gee, respected fellow blogger and world renowned connectologist, summarizes this latest study under the headline “Impact of Remote Monitoring Still Inconclusive”.
Tim, I’m concerned that folks might draw […]
Cut Co-Pays for Prescription Drugs to Zero? Are You Crazy? No, and Here’s Why.
The tagline to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal [subscription required] reads: Employers, Insurers Bet That Covering More of the Cost of Drugs Can Save Money Over the Long Term for Chronic Conditions
Desperate for ways to curb soaring health-care costs, a groundswell of employers and health insurers are turning to a radically different approach: motivate patients to take not just the cheapest medicines, but the ones they need the most….
Behind the about-face is mounting evidence that higher copayments may […]
More Evidence Suggesting that Consumer Driven Health Plans Can Have a Negative Impact on Chronic Care
What impact will CDHPs (consumer driven health plans) have on patients with chronic conditions? Jason Shafrin of Healthcare Economist blog refers to a recent study examining this important issue:
The authors also found that increased cost sharing led to a slight increase in hospitalizations. However, when the subpopulation of individuals with chronic health conditions is examined, large increases in hospitalization rates are found. This means that individuals with chronic health conditions forego office visits and drug purchases due to the increase in price, […]
Links: May 6, 2007
A Majority of Consumers Favor Secure Electronic Health Information Exchange Attitude and Opinion Research – Executive SummaryeHealth Initiative Foundation; Released May 2, 2007
Systematic Review of Home Telemonitoring for Chronic Diseases: The Evidence BaseJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association, May/June 2007
Informatics Systems to Promote Improved Care for Chronic Illness: A Literature Review Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association; March/April 2007
A Founding Father of DM Astonishingly Declares: “My Kid is Ugly”
Al Lewis, one of the founding fathers of DM, has shaped the face of the DM industry probably more than other any single individual. (This is all fine unless you happen to be the person whose face is being shaped by Al.)
Al has been unabashedly pro-DM. Until now. Al writes in a recent article in Managed Healthcare Executive:
Disease management as we now define it may be on its last legs, though no one knows it yet. The Disease Management Purchasing Consortium has noticed that the savings in all […]
Physician EHR Implementation Is Doggone Difficult
Now that Medicare’s future direction for chronic care management has become murky, I’ve started to pay more attention to the many other demonstration/pilot projects that Medicare has in the works relating to chronic care.
In April Medicare announced roll out of its DOQ-IT U (Doctor’s Office Quality — Information Technology University), as a part of the Physician Focused Quality Initiative. DOQ-IT U is an interactive, Web-based tool designed to provide solo and small-to-medium sized physician practices with the education for successful […]
Five Lingering Questions Holding Back Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) Adoption
Technology adoption often takes longer than expected, and remote patient monitoring (RPM) is no exception. More specifically, I’m referring to multiparameter RPM of patient vital signs. There are currently over 25 companies with multiparameter RPM offerings, including Philips, Honeywell HomMed, Health Hero, ViTel Net, and many others.
I am a big believer in RPM technology — it WILL revolutionize delivery of health care.
However, I’m also a realist. Consider the following questions a collective “voice-of-the-customer” from my six years working in this […]