An eloquently expressed lesson from Nanaimo (Canada) on electronic medical records failure
Unfortunately, this eloquent piece on EHR failure expresses precisely the major problems with this experimental technology thatgeneric medical managers and other medical bureaucrats are unwilling to hear, and/or unable to fully comprehend.At my May 31, 2016 post "HIT Mayhem, Canadian Style: Nanaimo (Vancouver Island) doctors say electronic health record system unsafe, should be shut down, non-medical PR hacks say it ' s perfectly safe" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2016/05/hit-mayhem-canadian-style-nanaimo.html, I wrote:... To hell with doctors and nurses and their concerns about horrible health IT. ...
Source: Health Care Renewal - March 24, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: generic management Healthcare IT experiment Healthcare IT failure healthcare IT risk Mismanagement Nanaimo Vancouver Island Source Type: blogs
Who Benefits? - From the Mayo Clinic Explicitly Putting Commercially Insured Patients Ahead of Some Government Insured Patients?
Amidst all the chaotic noise emanating from Washington, DC, little snippets of news keep slipping out reminding us that the US health care system remains monumentally dysfunctional, and that the dysfunction serves the interests of the system ' s insiders.Putting Commercially Insured Patients FirstOn March 15, 2017, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune first reported that the CEO of the august Mayo Clinic had stated in a late 2016 speech to Clinic personnel that henceforth the institution would preferentially accept patients with private insurance over those with public (Medicaid or Medicare) insurance under certain circumstances.w...
Source: Health Care Renewal - March 20, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: discrimination executive compensation Mayo Clinic Medicaid Medicare mission-hostile management Source Type: blogs
A Beach Too Far - Ill-Informed, Conflicted Members of the " Beachhead Team " for the Department of Health and Human Services
DiscussionThe purpose of the " beachhead teams " dispatched to the DHHS is still obscure. It seems likely that the team is meant to have a major early influence on operations of the Department, which has very important health care regulatory responsibilities, sponsors major biomedical and health care research programs, and administers the major government health insurance programs. Given that, why the Trump administration chose thes particular team members is more obscure. None have apparent experience as health professionals or as medical or health care researchers, and many do not seem to have any...
Source: Health Care Renewal - March 15, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest DHHS Donald Trump revolving doors Source Type: blogs
Whose Costs? Who Benefits? - A Close Reading of a Hospital System CEO's Prescription for Controlling Health Care Costs
The attempt to " repeal and replace " the Affordable Care Act has suddenly made health care dysfunction a hot topic in the US. For example, today, in my local paper, the Providence Journal, Dr Timothy J Bainbeau, the CEO of the Lifespan Health System, the biggest regional health systemweighed in on the problem of high and increasing health care costs. A close reading of his commentary suggests how the leadership of big US health care organizations needs to think about whether their actions have become more of the problem than a source of solutions.The CEO ' s Diagnosis and Prescription Dr Babineau beg...
Source: Health Care Renewal - March 10, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: CEO disease executive compensation market fundamentalism neoliberalism perverse incentives Source Type: blogs
Experts, anger, and the madness of crowds
We find ourselves in a most peculiar historical moment. Among other things--many other things--problems of health care policy, research, and clinical practice more and more resemble those of society at large. There ' s a general sense everywhere that, whatever the outfit, the Wrong Guy is in charge of it. Then like a snake eating its tail, we argue endlessly about the details.It ' s enough to give one a migraine, bigly. Whether we ' re talking DC, the Oscars, or (OMG) yet another health care reorg: if only we could get rid of the Gang That Couldn ' t Shoot Straight. But replace [fill in the blank] ... with what?L...
Source: Health Care Renewal - March 5, 2017 Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs
Patient or Corporate Advocacy Organizations? - New Studies Shed Some Light
This study analyzed public records (US Internal Revenue Service form 990 tax reports, annual reports and website) on the largest US based patient advocacy organizations, that is, those with revenues of at least $7.5 million. Its goal was to determine how well these organizations disclose conflicts of interests, and how they have COIs, and what policies they have to mitigate their effects.Its main results were that:-Disclosure was modest. 88% of organizations disclosed their donors, 52% disclosed approximate amounts of donations, but only 5% disclosed exact amounts. 74% provided some information about the ...
Source: Health Care Renewal - March 3, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest deception health care corruption institutional conflicts of interest patient advocacy groups Source Type: blogs
As US Attorney, Labor Secretary Nominee Enabled Drug and Biotechnology Executives' Impunity
The new Trump administration nominee for US Secretary of Labor is a former US Attorney for the southern district of Florida. In that role, he seemed to uphold the ideas that certain big corporations, particularly big pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations, are too big to jail, and that top executives of big corporations should not be held accountable for their corporations ' actions.He had central involvement in three bigsettlements of charges of corporate misbehavior which held no individuals accountable for enabling, authorizing, directing or implementing the bad behavior. The settlements imposed only ...
Source: Health Care Renewal - February 21, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: bribery Bristol-Myers-Squibb deception Donald Trump Genzyme GlaxoSmithKline impunity kickbacks legal settlements manipulating clinical research Sanofi-Aventis Source Type: blogs
A Voice for Reason - Dr Mickey Nardo
We mourn the loss of Dr Mickey Nardo, chief blogger at1BoringOldMan, a voice of reason, a defender of truth in health care. Dr Nardo was one of the principles in the famous re-analysis of Study 329, and has campaigned for rational use of clinical evidence in psychiatry.For further details, see the apparentlyfinal post on 1BoringOldMan. We look forward to the prospect of the blog being transformed into a book.Please consider signing this petition that Dr Nardo supported:Stop False Reporting of Drug Benefits& Harms by Making FDA& NIH Work Together (Source: Health Care Renewal)
Source: Health Care Renewal - February 20, 2017 Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs
Making Health Care Conflicts of Interest Great Again: A Consultant to Medicaid and Simultaneously to Medicaid Vendors for CMS?
President Trump campaigned on behalf of the neglected middle class, but at least in the health care sphere, those he has chosen for their advice or considered for nomination seemed to be more the corporate class.Tomorrow, Ms Seema Verma, nominated by the Trump administration to be director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), one of the most powerful US government health care positions, will have an opportunity to appear before a Senate committee. Ms Verma, unlike some other people President Trump has considered for health care leadership or advisory positions, does seem to have a background ...
Source: Health Care Renewal - February 15, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: CMS conflicts of interest Donald Trump Medicaid Source Type: blogs
Bad HIT in pharmacy: Hospital to pay half million dollar fine after pharmacist's drug theft
This is an example where bad health IT in an " infrastructure " system (as opposed to a clinician-facing system) led to a quite unfortunate outcome for the community.Bad Health IT ( " BHIT " ) is defined as IT that is ill-suited to purpose, hard to use, unreliable, loses data or provides incorrect data, is difficult and/or prohibitively expensive to customize to the needs of different medical specialists and subspecialists, causes cognitive overload, slows rather than facilitates users, lacks appropriate alerts, creates the need for hypervigilance (i.e., towards avoiding IT-related mishaps) that increases stress, is l...
Source: Health Care Renewal - February 12, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: Abington Memorial Hospital bad health IT bad phamacy IT DEA healthcare IT risks US Attorney ' s Office Source Type: blogs
More Health Care Professionals and Trainees Provoked to Resist - Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Protest of Leaders' Acquiescence to Trump's Muslim Travel Ban
The executive order by President Trump that temporarily banned immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries provoked health care professionals and trainees to challenge another health care leader whom had not been so challenged previously.We recently described how professionals and trainees protested the decision by Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove not to cancel a fund raising event a Mar a Lago, the resort owned by President Trump, even though Mr Trump ' s ban had resulted in the deportation (since reversed) of a Cleveland Clinic physician trainee, and Cleveland Clinic health care professionals and trainees had...
Source: Health Care Renewal - February 9, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: anechoic effect boards of directors Bristol-Myers-Squibb conflicts of interest Donald Trump Harvard Medical School logical fallacies Source Type: blogs
Health Care Professionals and Trainees Finally Provoked to Resist - Cleveland Clinic Protest of CEO's Acquiescence to Trump's Muslim Travel Ban
We frequently discuss theanechoic effect, the failure of cases illustrating problems withconcentration and abuse of power, unethical andcorrupt behavior, and faulty leadership and governance in health care to generate much public discussion, much less outrage. In particular, physicians and other health care professionals seem very reluctant to discuss such cases, perhaps fearing disapproval or retaliation by colleagues or bosses. But they times they are a changin ' .Dr Delos (Toby) Cosgrove had been accused of multiple conflicts of interest the first decade of the century. These charges seemingly generate...
Source: Health Care Renewal - February 5, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: Cleveland Clinic conflicts of interest Donald Trump mission-hostile management Source Type: blogs
Health Care Renewal Bloggers to Lead Session on Conflicts of Interest and Health Care Corruption at Society for General Internal Medicine Meeting
Bloggers D r Wally Smith and Dr Roy Poses will be leading a sub-session on conflicts of interest and health care corruption in a late breaking session during theannual meeting of the Society for General Internal Medicine in Washington, DC. The session will be on advocacy related to important health policy issues that are now most salient in the current political context in the US. The official session title is still pending. The session will offer multiple sub-sessions on the most pertinent issues. The meeting goes from 19 - 22 April, 2017. Our session will be on Thursday, 20 April, at 11:30 AM....
Source: Health Care Renewal - February 2, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest health care corruption Source Type: blogs
Will Trump's Leadership Picks Smack Down Health Care? - A Drug Company Lobbyist, an Entrepreneur Who Wants to Weaken Drug Testing, and a Mysterious Billionaire Who Settled Fraud Charges
President Trump in hisinauguration speech promised to reach out to " struggling families " and to benefit " American workers and American families, " and promised all Americans " you will never be ignored again. " Yet the Trump transition team, and now presidential administration continues to consider individuals for health care policy leadership roles remarkable for theirconflicts of interest, which often did not merely arise from small financial transactions but from their roles as corporate insiders, and in some cases, association with dubiously ethical practices. They are particularly unremarkable for their...
Source: Health Care Renewal - January 27, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest Covidien Donald Trump executive compensation fraud Medtronic revolving doors Source Type: blogs
Making Research Suppressed Again - US Secretary of Health Candidate Accused of Suppressing Clinical Research at Behest of Campaign Donor
This report is greater than 5 years old. Findings may be used for research purposes but should not be considered current. 'In particular,Gary Beck, a policy assistant to the congressman, first reached out to the federal research agency about the study in July, emails show. ' I have been in contact with representatives from Arbor Pharmaceuticals based in Georgia in regard to some issues they have with the study that is linked below, ' he wrote, adding that the company told him ' the study might be outdated ' and they wanted it removed from the website.' I wanted to get in touch with you to get a better grasp on the situatio...
Source: Health Care Renewal - January 20, 2017 Category: Health Management Tags: BilDil CHF conflicts of interest evidence-based medicine health care corruption Nitromed suppression of medical research Source Type: blogs
