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Medicare and DM: Synthesis in 500 Words
Can I interest you in a 2 minute summary of DM in Medicare? Please read my posting Medicare Chronic Disease Management Direction? It’s Anybody’s Guess on the World Health Care Blog.
The World Health Care Blog is a unique experiment sponsored by the World Health Care Congress. Please also check out the excellent health care blogs of my fellow bloggers:
Tony Chen at Hospital Impact
Emily Devoto at The Antidote: Counterspin for Health Care and Health News
Matthew Holt at The Health Care Blog
Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline
David Williams at Health Business Blog
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Thanks Vince, always wonderfully concise and fascinating.
As an observation, it seems that the problem lies in the nature of the innovation. Is it in the gadgets created? or is it in the programs around them? Is it in the payment system? or is it all of the above? I think that sometimes we all tend to put the cart before the horse. In some cases I have seen wonderful and innovative management systems in search of patients, in other cases I have seen great business models but not product. It seems that Medicare is interested but they want to see savings to justify the expense and if the way to do that is to get patients to manage their health care better, then the key would be to finding tools, application, gadgets, approaches that would be as user friendly as possible. In this instance I would define such user friendliness as finding ways to integrate into patients existing lifestyles as easily and seemlessly as possible. Don Jones (SVP, Qualcomm) describes the 7 that are required to satisfy User needs. Key among them in my opinion, Confidentiality; where a user can manage their health issue wherever, whenever they wanted and anyone around would not be aware of any health issue. I would also add that such approach should also be designed to involve the physician/medical side on an as need basis as opposed to many existing approaches which are more of the always on mode. The cost implication are otherwise prohibitive and this is where I think the Holy Grail may lie.
As noted in Vince’s commentary above, there certainly seems to be interest on the Medicare side, but they want savings. The law of averages shows that the more people involved, the greater the number using it, resulting in greater gross savings to the system. Therefore, the more a solution can easily integrate into a patients life, the greater the usability and acceptance.
Anyway, that’s my 2 minute thought on a 2 minute summary.