By DAVID C. KIBBE & BRIAN KLEPPER Finally, we have a Final Rule on the Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive programs.

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Beyond Meaningful Use: Three Five-Year Trends in the Uses of Patient Health Data and Clinical IT

By MICHAEL MILLENSON The humble tonsillectomy has been at the center of controversies over practice variation, inappropriate surgery and avoidable harm for decades; indeed, well before the terms to describe those problems were formally articulated. Now, thanks to the recently…

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Remembering the Tonsillectomy Riots

The Wall Street Journal reported on a study in Health Affairs entitled ” A Progress Report On Electronic Health Records In U.S. Hospitals ” by Harvard researcher Ashish Jha and colleagues.

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Similar Conclusions on Health IT Via Observation and Via Research: Is HIT ‘Mission Impossible’?

With apologies to the late Frank Zappa… even though we are going through the dog days of summer, the parade of health care troubles in the news is never ending, so I thought I would recap some of the more interesting issues discussed by some of my fellow health care skeptic bloggers

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"Trouble Coming Every Day" as Discussed by our Fellow Health Care Skeptics

The issue of executive compensation in health care seems to be attracting more media attention. A St Louis Post-Dispatch editorial noted how executive compensation for for-profit health insurance CEOs has grown. It started with a quote from Steven Hemsley, the CEO of UnitedHealth: Today the American people are questioning whether or not we receive fair value for the $2.6 trillion we, as a society, are expecting to spend this year on our health care system .

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Can a $1 Billion Group of Babies Provide Fair Value in Health Care?

Two recent stories from two different parts of the US continue the theme of ever increasing concentration of power in our health care system. Connecticut The Hartford Business Journal reported on growing interest in mergers among small Connecticut hospitals.

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More Examples of US Hospital Market Consolidation: Connecticut and Florida

In the Battle of Britain in WW2, the Royal Air Force (RAF) heroically repelled a foreign invasion of the UK. The Supermarine Spitfire , key defense tool in the Battle of Britain. (Worked without major glitches.) Now, the invasion is American, and the battlefield is healthcare..

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Cerner’s Blitzkrieg on London: Where’s the RAF?

Also available at: http://danielwrasmus.wordpress.com/ As America grasps for innovative ways to exit the recession, we have forgotten a fundamental business reality: measurement determines behavior. Ask any sales person if their bonus structure determines which products they lead with or not. The problem with America’s national investments is that they say green, but they shout industrial age thinking

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Strategic Measures–Toward New Measures for a Sustainable, Knowledge Economy

Whether a soldier needs a cure for the common cold or brain surgery, the NATO hospital on Kandahar Airfield can handle it. This is one of Afghanistan’s most sophisticated hospitals, and it provides top medical care on the front line. Just minutes by helicopter from most conflict spots in the country’s south, the hospital saves the lives of 98 percent of the injured who come here.

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NATO Hospital Offers Top Notch Care in Taliban Heartland | Asia | English

This past week I received notice that I was again selected by my peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America ® 2011 in the field of “Health Care Law”.

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FSB: Best Lawyers in America 2011

“Critical thinking always, or your patient’s dead” – Victor Satinsky, MD, NSF-funded summer science training program (SSTP) for high school students, Hahnemann Medical College, early 1970′s. Health IT projects are incredibly complex undertakings in equally complex, mission-critical medical environments.

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EPIC’s outrageous recommendations on healthcare IT project staffing

In late 2009, we posted about problems at a Genzyme plant that manufactured some fabulously expensive drugs, e.g. Cerezyme whose cost to patients approximated $160,000 a year. We thought then that for a drug costing that much, the company ought to have figured out a conservative process to provide pure and unadulterated product.

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A Golden Parachute for Making Contaminated Drugs?

iHealthBeat reports that West Virginia Medicaid along with five other states will receive federal matching funds from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS)to help implement electronic health record (EHR) incentive programs. West Virginia Medicaid will receive $945,000 in federal matching funds. The CMS press release indicates that West Virginia will use the funds for planning activities that include conducting a comprehensive analysis to determine the current status of HIT activities in the state.

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CMS Awards WV Medicaid $945K Federal Matching Funds for EHR Incentive Programs

As more and more organizations gain experience in the application of Lean Healthcare methodologies, I frequently find myself involved in conversations that lead to the ultimate question of Sustainability.  During one of these recent talks, I was reminded of a 2006 blog post on the Lean Healthcare Exchange regarding Newton’s …

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Newton’s Law Revisited: Keeping the Ball Rolling

I have seen a shift over the past year in the discussions  that I have with Healthcare leaders.  We are facing considerable financial pressures in the Healthcare Industry  today – increased demand on an already overburdened system with skyrocketing technology costs.  With well documented results from Lean Healthcare implementation around …

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A Shout Out to the CFO…

The new health overhaul law will start producing savings for Medicare right away and, over time, will add 12 years of solvency to the program’s giant trust fund for inpatient care, the Obama administration says in a report to be released Monday.

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Health-care law to save Medicare $8 billion through next year, report predicts

The health care reform law, which is designed to cover millions of uninsured people, will squeeze the profitability of the largest commercial health insurers over the long term, making them unattractive investments, according to Edward Jones analyst Aaron Vaughn.

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Analyst sees health-care reform squeezing insurance profits

Virginia’s lawsuit challenging the Obama administration’s health care reform package has cleared its first legal hurdle. A federal judge has denied the Justice Department’s attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed.

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Health Care Reform

RICHMOND, Va. Virginias lawsuit challenging the Obama administrations health care reform law cleared its first legal hurdle Monday as a federal judge ruled the law raises a host of complex constitutional issues. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli claims in the lawsuit that Congress doesnt have the authority to require citizens to buy health insurance

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Health care reform lawsuit clears 1st hurdle

Hammond says some cutting-edge researchers afraid to “make a technology decision.” Al Hammond belongs in the same category with CK Prahalad and Stuart Hart as some of the world’s pioneering bottom-of-the-pyramid researchers and strategists, and Hammond has specifically targeted rural connectivity and health care. From the World Resources Institute, where he authored the pivotal research report, The Next 4 Billion , to Ashoka, where he forges links between private companies and citizen sector organizations, whatever Hammond is working on at the moment is something you know you need to keep your eye on

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Al Hammond Shares the Latest in Bottom-of-the-Pyramid Innovations