Root causes
My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to explain why we ' re spending all this money on medicine and getting sick and dying more and sooner than the countries that spend half as much. First, we need to take a step back and consider the actual determinants of health. The Kaiser Family Foundation has offered a convenient picture: You ' ll notice that the so-called " Health Care System " appears in two of the six columns, but on the leftmost, it ' s actually negative -- medical bills and debt harm people ' s health. Only in the rightmost column does it have positive value, and even then it ' s unevenly distr...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 24, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Three Ways AI is Preventing Revenue Leakage
The following is a guest article by Dan Parsons, Co-Founder and CPO at Thoughtful
Revenue leakage poses a significant challenge to healthcare providers, and the traditional methods used to mitigate these losses are becoming increasingly difficult to scale.
Healthcare providers need an adaptable and scalable solution to address these issues permanently. RCM automation, powered by artificial intelligence, can achieve this – saving considerable time and adding millions of dollars to the bottom line. Additionally, automation simplifies adaptation to the evolving payer landscape for healthcare providers.
Andreessen Horowitz p...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - February 23, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Guest Author Tags: Administration AI/Machine Learning Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Revenue Cycle Management a16z Andreessen Horowitz Automation Claims Processing CPT Dan Parsons KaufmanHall ProPublica RCM Revenue Lea Source Type: blogs
Hoovering up the cash
I think I might have shown this before. It ' s spending on " healthcare, " i.e. medical services and goods in the U.S., as a percent of GDP. It leveled off for a while after passage of the ACA, but it ' s going back up: All that moolah isn ' t buying us better health though. We ' re spending twice as much as comparable countries and getting the least for it: Naturally, all that cash is going mostly to one place: capitalists.Recent
decades have seen one overarching trend: consolidation of the medical industry into fewer and larger entities.•Horizontal
consolidation: similar institutions merge into chains. ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 22, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Transforming Chronic Care Management: A Comprehensive, Technology-Driven Approach
The following is a guest article by Kevin Riley, CEO and President at Zyter|TruCare
In an era dominated by the complex challenges of chronic diseases, which account for approximately 90% of healthcare costs, a strategic approach to chronic care management (CCM) is essential. This approach should integrate advanced technology with a deep comprehension of healthcare’s fundamental principles, effectively tackling the current challenges and proactively shaping the future of healthcare. Emphasizing patient-centered solutions, this methodology is set to revolutionize the management of chronic diseases, thereby impacting pa...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - February 22, 2024 Category: Information Technology Authors: Guest Author Tags: Ambulatory Analytics/Big Data C-Suite Leadership Clinical Communication and Patient Experience Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Regulations ahrq CCM Chronic Care Chronic Care Management Chronic Diseaase Ma Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Imprecatory prayer for terrorism
In Psalm 69, the protagonist has for unspecified reasons become an outcast, so he begs God to destroy his enemies. Check out verse 22 et seq. While this is attributed to David, there isn ' t really any point in David ' s story that would correspond to this situation. But petitioning God to commit mass violence is a common theme in the psalms.To the choirmaster: according to Lilies. A Psalm of David.69 Save me, O God!For the waters have come up to my neck.2 I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.3 ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 21, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The inflection point
Okay, pretty correct answers from our two commenters on the previous post. Not just chlorination, but clean water generally, i.e. sewage treatment and separating sewage from drinking water sources. Also pasteurization of milk was very important. But the story is a bit more complicated. Pre-industrial people were mostly rural, obviously drank their milk fresh and didn ' t have a lot to fear from waterborne diseases since their population was sparse. Obviously they did suffer greatly from other plagues -- the Black Death killed something like half the population of Europe in the mid-14th Century, and plague recurred in lesse...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 20, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Language Equity in Medical Education
On this episode of the Academic Medicine Podcast, Pilar Ortega, MD, MGM, Débora Silva, MD, MEd, and Bright Zhou, MD, MS, join host Toni Gallo to discuss strategies to address language-related health disparities and enhance language-appropriate training and assessment in medical education. They explore one specific language concordant education framework, Culturally Reflective Medicine, which recognizes and supports the lived experiences and expertise of multi-lingual learners and clinicians from minoritized communities.
This episode is now available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else podcast...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - February 20, 2024 Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: amrounds Tags: AM Podcast AM Podcast Transcript Academic Medicine podcast diversity and inclusion language equity medical education medical education scholarship patient care Source Type: blogs
So what can we do about health care costs?
By MATTHEW HOLT
Last week Jeff Goldsmith wrote a great article in part explaining why health care costs in the US went up so much between 1965 and 2010. He also pointed out that health care has been the same portion of GDP for more than a decade (although we haven’t had a major recession in that time other than the Covid 2020 blip when it went up to 19%). However, it’s worth remembering that we are spending 17.3% of GDP while the other main OECD countries are spending 11-12%. Now it’s true that the US has lots of social problems that show up in heath spending and also that those other countries probably spend ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - February 20, 2024 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Matthew Holt Buzz Cooper Datmouth health spending Jeff Goldsmith John Wennberg Medicare Price controls Source Type: blogs
Mid-term exam: Essay question
Here is a historical graph of life expectancy at birth, for Homo sapiens on planet Earth. The picture for the U.S. specifically is very similar, although the upturn started a bit earlier. (That mysterious dip around 1959 is the Chinese famine resulting from the so-called Great Leap Forward. In a graph of just the U.S., you would see a similar dip around 1918, from the influenza pandemic.) You can extend that horizontal tail back 6,000 years or more. In any given local area it might have gone up a bit in good times and down in times of plague or famine, but it basically stayed at around 30 years, never abov...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 19, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Obscurantism
Psalm 67 is a mercifully brief, simple song of praise. Psalm 68, however, is both exceedingly long and has been called the" most difficult and obscure of the psalms. "The RSV actually covers up some of the difficulty, for example by translating verse 4 as " His name is the Lord, " whereas the Hebrew actually says " His name is Yah. " That is a specific short form of Yahweh. The KJV spells if Jah, as do Rastafarians who prefer it as the name of god, but the Hebrew pronunciation is closer to English Y than J. The form Yah appears 43 times in the Psalms, but otherwise only once in Exodus and several times in Isaiah. It is par...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 18, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
More epistemology
Many people find it uncomfortable to live with deep mystery. They want their questions answered. Many people also need to be handed meaning and purpose on a platter -- it ' s too difficult to make their own, especially in the face of hardship and injustice. Making up stories that seem to satisfy the need for explanation and meaning is a temptation that many just can ' t resist. But for other people, testing stories against empirical reality is more important. Whatever dissatisfaction or psychological distress we suffer from choosing to live in reality is worth it to us, because we want the truth more than anything. On...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The knowledge machine
That ' s the title of a book my Michael Strevens, which I recommend. (Liveright, New York, 2020)Strevens presents his own take on the philosophy of science accessibly and persuasively. If you ' ve even dabbled in this area you ' ve heard of the so-called demarcation problem -- how can we tell science from pseudoscience -- and the two best-known modern conceptions of science, Kuhn ' s construct of paradigms and paradigm shifts, and Popper ' s construct of falsfiability. Strevens doesn ' t think Kuhn or Popper are quite right. However I would say that without quite realizing it, he ' s pretty close to Popper -- he just...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 15, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The show is about nothing
The next three psalms are just not very interesting. The first amounts to a curse against the singer ' s unspecified and undescribed enemies, who he is confident God will shoot with an arrow. The second is a standard song of praise, giving God credit for nature and what it offers. The third is more praise for God and a pledge to keep on worshiping and sacrificing. There isn ' t much to say about these, except that they seem to fulfill the function that songs do today in religious services, to remind people of what they are supposed to believe and deepen their investment. Of course these beliefs are contradictory -- God wil...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 14, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Patient Advocates Argue Exercising Bayh-Dole " March-In " Rights Reasonable to Ensure Ongoing Supply of an Insulin Novo Nordisk Intends to Discontinue
Back in 2016 (when President Obama was still in office), the trade group known as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (better known by the acronym PhRMA) claimed in an organization-published white paper (seehttps://web.archive.org/web/20161022175500/https://phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/bayh-dole-act-white-paper-summary.pdf for an archived copy of that paper from PhRMA; note that it has since been removed from PhRMA ' s website, hence I found a copy on the Internet Archive) that championed the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Understand that what PhRMA really wants to prevent a particular provision...
Source: Scott's Web Log - February 11, 2024 Category: Endocrinology Tags: march-in rights 2024 Alliance to Protect Insulin Choice APIC Bayh-Dole insulin detemir Levemir Novo Nordisk Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The Divine Right of Kings
Psalm 61 implies that God will always protect and reward those who are faithful to him. Of course we know that isn ' t so. Then we get two psalms, also attributed to David, and all implying, in one way or another, that David is chosen of God -- to be an enemy of David is to be an enemy of God, and vice versa. Not to worry, though, God is going to come through and destroy David ' s enemies, who are by definition unrighteous. This was the common ideological basis of nations in that time -- an alliance between a priestly caste and warrior kings, with the king ruling by divine sanction. It is very weird that a substantial part...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 11, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
