February 3, 2012 Gabriel Perna
I find it fascinating how typically members of the two parties in congress find themselves poles apart on most policy issues – especially in a politically charged election year – and yet they’ve found they common ground on health IT. Recently, the Washington D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) released a report stating there are numerous obstacles in the way of an effective deployment of health IT. The report came with multiple recommendations on how the government can do better.
February 2, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
During last week’s Care Innovations Summit, sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, I was intrigued by one presentation in particular, one by Christopher Chen, M.D., CEO of ChenMed during the Care Delivery/Primary Care Innovation Panel. A lot of what Dr. Chen said seemed intuitive, providing care teams for a well-defined population. And his company’s approach to technology has many applications beyond his four walls.
February 2, 2012 John DeGaspari
One of the biggest signs of how important social media is to the nation’s social (and business) fabric can be found in today’s headlines: Facebook Inc.’s filing of an initial public offering that could raise as much as $10 billon when it begins selling shares this spring, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal article says the IPO could raise the value of the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion.
Also noteworthy is the social network’s membership, with 845 million users globally, up 39 percent from the year before. “In just eight years, Facebook has the world’s social bazaar, where friends gossip, play games and swap 250 million photos per day,” the Journal article says. It might also have added that that Facebook, and social networks in general, is changing the way many patients are becoming engaged with their own healthcare.
January 31, 2012 Mark Hagland
The results coming out of three years of hospitals' participation in the Premier Health Alliance's QUEST program are in, and they are stunning. When it comes to performance improvement, both on the patient safety/care quality side, and on the cost-reduction side, the QUEST results show that there is no excuse for lack of performance improvement.
