September 24, 2012 Gabriel Perna
Over the past week or so, I’ve noticed that this idea of getting patients to be more involved with their own health outcomes has really been pushed into the forefront of the healthcare landscape—even more so than usual. From the government’s Blue Button push to healthcare policy experts discussing it at length at a recent conference, it seems everyone has patient engagement in mind.
September 13, 2012 Gabriel Perna
Almost everyone says that changing the way healthcare is delivered is a long-lasting, cultural transformation. When thinking of the recent New York City soda ban, it’s hard not to draw comparisons. However, it’s important to ask, what role does government play in changing behavior, and can it overstep its bounds?
September 5, 2012 Gabriel Perna
Everywhere I turn lately, I see some kind of new patient engagement-centered platform being touted by vendors, providers, and/or payers. A recent conversation I had with Richard Ferrans, M.D., vice president and chief medical officer at Presence Health, helped open my eyes as to why everyone wants to get in on the patient engagement bandwagon.
August 29, 2012 Gabriel Perna
After the CMS released the proposed rule for Stage 2 of meaningful use, it received a ton of pushback from providers on the patient engagement requirement, which asked for 10 percent of patients look at their data, download it, or transmit it to others through a portal. While it lowered the threshold by five percent, the point has been reinforced. Whether you like the patient engagement requirement or not, it’s time to push forward.
August 17, 2012 Gabriel Perna
The recent negative publicity surrounding Progressive is a lesson on how not to engage the outside world. When the car insurance company tried to respond to a negative story with an automated, robotic response, its place in the public eye went from bad to worse. When it comes to engaging patients on social media, healthcare leaders at hospitals need not be Progressive.
August 13, 2012 Gabriel Perna
A recent conversation with HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland got me thinking about some of the initiatives I’ve seen popping up recently, in which leading healthcare institutions are using their resources to start up centers that aim to solve greater issues in the industry. Johns Hopkins and NYU are two examples of large-scale collaborations that are looking at population health and mobile health, respectively.
August 3, 2012 Gabriel Perna
This week was a big one for healthcare in my home state of Massachusetts. Along with announcing the creation of a statewide HIE from CMS funds (making them the first state in the nation to receive federal funding participation approval through CMS to create a HIE), lawmakers from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed another landmark bill. Appropriately named the Health Care Cost Control Bill (HCCB), it has a goal of cutting healthcare costs by $200 billion by 2028 by implementing a spending limit.
July 27, 2012 Gabriel Perna
As the 2012 Olympic kicks off in London, somewhere amid the spectacle there will be a hint of healthcare informatics touching the Games. Yes, even the health IT world can’t escape Olympic fever. Here are a few examples where the two worlds are connecting.
July 20, 2012 Gabriel Perna
There is a battle going on in the nation's capital over the highly controversial Affordable Care Act, and one of the casualties could be the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) if some congressmen in Washington D.C. get their way. Without getting into specific politics, any suggestion to get rid of AHRQ is in a word: crazy.
July 6, 2012 Gabriel Perna
A book I’ve been reading about the death of President James Garfield can be connected to a recent report which discussed patient safety at-length. The report, from Consumer Reports, looked at the safety rankings of U.S. hospitals in six measures. The results were not positive for the healthcare industry, according to Consumer Reports, which said more than half (51 percent) of the hospitals rated received a score below 50 (on a scale of 1-100).
.jpg)
