John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Posts Tagged ‘consumer-directed health care’
Patient-centered Care – Let citizens manage their health
December 21, 2008
In a well-written post about the problem with healthcare, Dr. Kenneth H. Cohn talks about his recent personal experience with a medical problem while he was between PCPs. Sounds like a nightmare but that’s what too much of healthcare is today. Specifically, he identifies these problems as presented by the Health Finance Forum:
- The (non)-system does not encourage social benefit, such as access to care.
- It does not reward wellness or high-quality care.
- It creates financial instability by adding cost and complexity to health administration, rewarding high-cost practices and focusing on expensive sickness-focused interventions rather than wellness.
He suggests some solutions:
- Stop the insurance company micromanagement; it adds not only cost and complexity
- Let citizens manage their health with their physicians through a variety of channels, such as website interactions that do not force us to drive to our doctor’s office for prescriptions when we are in acute pain and know what we need to do to recover.
- Design systems using interdependent, rather than fragmented, processes, that improve patients’ healthcare outcomes, rather than tolerating arbitrary rules that exist for the convenience of insurers.
Great ideas – read the whole post.
Consumer-Centricity
March 6, 2008
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn posts a commentary on the HIMSS 2008 conference identifying significant themes which came through in this monster conference-exhibition of 28,000. The these include:
- openness – of code such as Microsoft’s promise to open their API to HealthVault and Google doing the same for Google Health, others also demonstrating interoperability
- security – privacy protection, Google Health (is it secure enough), World Privacy Forum
- consumer-centric – not just from the big guys but also Allscripts and Relay Health
A good summary of a big event – worth reading.
Shopping for Care Packages
February 5, 2008
Another start up is moving into the consumer-directed healthcare space with an offering of shopping for carepackages. Carol.com offers a wide range of services but currently only in Minnesota. What is a care package? It is the packaging of healthcare services into bundles, such as, evaluation for asthma, laser vision correction, health and wellness classes and any service a consumer is willing to pay cash for. Will it catch on? I think it certainly will, maybe gradually at first but it will go national. Consumers will likely adopt this friendly term and be on the lookout for a health care shopping mall like this.
Consumerism in Health Care – Future Directions
January 4, 2008
In doing some digging on this topic, I found an article from Health Affairs from 2005 which calls for a new direction.
“Consumerism appeals to the widespread and legitimate desire for a more transparent, flexible, and personal system and provides a salutary counterbalance to the organizational hypertrophy and opaque administrative mechanisms of the managed care era.” The article goes on to recommend marrying the best of supply-side and demand side competition in health care to produce a new model.
“Different consumer-centric benefit designs and provider-centric network designs will be appropriate for different health services, depending on whether utilization is strongly consumer preference–sensitive, provider supply–sensitive, both, or neither.”
“Different forms of organization may offer the best combination of cost, quality, and convenience for different services depending on their clinical and technological characteristics.”
Check out the charts which describe some of these models: Benefit and Network Designs , Alternative Forms Of Provider Organization.
Consumer-Centric Health Care Congress
November 9, 2007
Video interviews are available from this congress being held in Washington, DC. One of the most interesting is Bridget Duffy, MD, who acknowledges the need to appeal to consumers who have the ability and initiative to shop for healthcare and how healthcare providers need to be transparent about outcomes.
Patient Advocate Blog
July 25, 2007
A recently launched blog by George Van Antwerp, focuses on consumer-directed health care and process improvement in healthcare. His perspective is from a consultant from the pharmaceutical industry but his thoughts are broad and deep. The most recent post is a summary of a Wired article on healthcare costs noting that the average family spent “$1,361 (3%) on health insurance and $405 (1%) on prescription drugs”.
Patient as Driver
June 7, 2007
Wayne A. Sensor is CEO of Alegent Health, Omaha, Neb. has written an article on the Most Wired website on “Taking the Wheel: Empowering Users to Make Informed Health Care Choices.” He utilizes the concept of patient as driver to draw attention to what he calls the last frontier for consumers, healthcare. “We must surround consumers with the information they need to complete the value equation: price plus quality equals value.” Adam Bosworth could not have said it better. Alegent has on their homepage two key tools which he would describe as patient empowerment tools
- MyCost – to help consumers understand their deductable and other out-of-pocket costs
- Quality Reports – detailed scorecard by disease
Every health system and hospital will be following leads like this to survive in this more transparent healthcare market where cost and quality will drive business.
Two Perspectives on Consumer Directed Healthcare
May 9, 2007
Dr. Bill Crounse of Microsoft writes about If Wal-Mart did Healthcare to compliment his recent post on If Disney did. He draws a scenario of no insurance coverage for medical costs under $5000 – “healthcare would behave like other industries were it not for the perverse effects of traditional insurance programs on the supply side of the business.”
On the other side is e-Care Management quoting a study that shows that those with chronic conditions do worse on CDHP, not surprising, since skipping appointments or medication to save money could easily result in a hospitalization.
No simple answers here – healthcare may act like a business and may need to change incentives, but incentives should move toward the best outcomes, not just market forces.
Quicken Health offered to Cigna Members
May 1, 2007
The San Jose Business Journal reports that Cigna will offer their members Quicken Health from Intuit at no charge. Similar to the personal finance version of Quicken, it allows the member to download claims information and organize medical expenses. Quicken already has their Medical Expense Manager in version 2.0 but the website indicates that Quicken Health is coming soon. Oriented toward Health Savings Account customers, the product will also allow downloading and organizing of medical records. Will this mean some kind of connection to the major EHR/PHR vendors? Quicken Health will also be offered by United Healthcare and others.
Curing the Trust Crisis in Health Care
April 20, 2007
Daniel A. Shore from the Harvard School of Public Health speaks on this topic at the Cato Institute tomorrow (4/20/2007). He has editted a new book on the topic as well, The Trust Crisis in Health Care. Here are some of the main points:
“- systemic conditions that lead to medical errors, and remedies for promoting quality of care.
- outdated modes of doctor-patient communication that hinder compliance.
- novel modes of interaction to improve satisfaction. – patient-centered care and metrics to evaluate its presence or absence.
- media communication and miscommunication, and new standards for medical reporting.
- clinical insights applied to the use of human subjects in biomedical research.
- recommendations for revising medical school curricula and strengthening the peer-review process in medical journals.
- practical strategies for decreasing the lingering discord between patients, providers, and health plans.”
While not directly related to Heath IT, the implications are there – EMRs and PHRs cannot succeed as long as their is an atmosphere of distrust between physician and patient.
