blue cross florida insurance

The Health Care Blog

• An EHR We Can All Agree On
  By Eric Novack This is a modified post from one I wrote in Nov of 2007. I report this as a part owner of a small business whose costs are increasing every year while revenues are decreasing. Therefore, I present...
• THCB is proudly sponsored by
  
• JSK on Health IT in 2009
  By Matthew Holt Savvy stuff, of course. Go read.
• The Connected Medical Home: Health 2.0 Says "Hello" to the Medical Home Model
  By David Kibbe & Joe Kvedar The concept of participatory medicine is taking hold, fueled, at least in part, by what we see as two complementary forces, these being the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) and Health 2.0. Health 2.0 is...
• Prop 8 still reverberates, and bigotry is still with us
  By Matthew Holt There’s a pretense from the anti (whoops!) pro-Prop 8 diehards that somehow this is not about them hating gay people. Rick Warren says that, as did Mike Huckerbee said when he ended his (clearly losing) conversation with...
• Weighing in on the New FDA Commissioner
  By MERRILL GOOZNER Patient advocacy groups, most of them drug industry-funded, have asked President-elect Barack Obama to appoint a Food and Drug Administration commissioner who won't cave in to pressure from lawmakers or the news media, according to the Wall...
• Cool Technology of the Week
  By John Halamka In my experience, social networking applications gain marketshare by being first to innovate and then spreading virally. I was an early adopter of Facebook but delayed joining Twitter, a microblog that enables me to post instant blog...
• Conservatives Need to be Part of Health Care Reform
  By Robert Laszewski Stuart Butler, Vice President of Domestic Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation has an op-ed in Thursday’s Washington Times, “Four Steps Can Heal Health Care.” He makes some very valuable points and proposes four steps toward reforming...
• THCB UPDATE
  If you haven't had a chance to sign up for THCB UPDATE yet, you really should. You'll get a helpful reminder email from us a few times a week when important posts go up on the site. In the two...
• Interview with Fred Goldstein, US Preventive Medicine
  By Matthew Holt Last year US Preventive Medicine (USPM) caused a little splash with some full page ads in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming itself the future of preventative care. Since then the company, which has raised a significant chunk...
• Now United HealthGroup settles with investors, your Friday teaser
  By Matthew Holt Can someone tell me how much money Bill McGuire has got left?
• California transplant surgeon acquitted
  By Sarah Arnquist A jury acquitted a San Francisco transplant surgeon Thursday of criminal charges related to his alleged actions during an attempted organ harvest nearly three years ago in a small town on California's central coast. In what's thought...
• The Medicare Ponzi Scheme
  By Eric Novack Just today, our next President spoke out against the largest investment swindle in US history. The alleged behavior of Bernard Madoff may have cost investors up to $50 billion. “In the last few days, the alleged scandal...
• Washington, Please don't bail out the health care industry
  By Rick Peters A health care Marshall Plan -- $50 Billion stimulus to get electronic health records (EHRs) in every doctor’s hands or $50,000 to each physician -– what an incredible marketing job. Detroit, are you listening? Stop whining to...
• An Open Letter to the Obama Health Team
  By David C. Kibbe & Brian Klepper It seems likely that the Obama administration and Congress will spend a significant amount on health IT by attaching it as a first-order priority to the fiscal stimulus package. We take the President-elect...
• Jack says cover the uninsured & spend less!
  By Matthew Holt It’s no secret what the Dartmouth group’s solution for the health care system has been — reduce practice variation, get surgery and physician resource use rates similar to the Mayo Clinics' of the world, and take the...
• Health 2.0 Conference is hiring
  By Matthew Holt As the conference grows up and does more, Matthew & Indu are looking to get some help! We are looking for a Conference Project and Production Manager and also a Registration, Customer Service & Sales Manager. These...
• ePatient Dave & his doc Danny Sands speak out
  By Matthew Holt One of the most remarkable people I’ve met this year is Dave deBronkart, better known as ePatient Dave (fourth from left on top of the e-Patients.net blog). Dave has had a remarkable recovery from cancer and has...
• The Hospitalist as Bed Czar: Indispensability, But At What Cost?
  By Bob Wachter In last week’s Annals of Internal Medicine, Eric Howell and colleagues describe an innovative experiment in which the hospitalists at Johns Hopkins Bayview became the institution’s bed czars. It worked. So should my program and yours take...
• The Inevitability of Health Care Reform: This Time, the Politics Have Changed
  By Michael Millenson Rummaging through my extensive files (i.e., drawers of paper), I came across this January/February 2001 issue of Healthplan, the magazine of the old American Association of Health Plans before it gobbled up the Health Insurance Association of...
• Low tech ways to improve patient care: sleep and manners
  By Michael Miller, MD A few recent reports point to ways for improving the quality of physician delivered care that has little to do with technology or complex interventions. The first involves how physicians interact with patients, and the second...
• Around the Web in 60 Seconds (Or Less)
  The L.A. Times reports on the financial difficulties of primary care docs in solo practices. Are large group practices the way of the future? MartketWatch reports on how interactive video games are motivating people to get active. The NY Times...
• A new national privacy and security framework for HIT
  By Bob Coffield The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) issued a paper Monday called The Nationwide Privacy and Security Framework for Electronic Exchange of Individually Identifiable Health Information. The summary states that the framework creates...
• From the fiscal to the physical: insured workers try to lower their medical costs
  By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn This is open enrollment season for those workers fortunate enough to (1) still be employed and (2) still be offered a health benefit. It’s also the season of economic decline. These workers are making different health and...
• On Health Care Reform Stimulating the Economy: The Massachusetts Example
  By Maggie Mahar Recently, a somewhat starry-eyed op-ed in the New York Times suggested that a $100 billion annual investment in universal health care is just the medicine that our economy needs. The goal, declared Jonathan Gruber, a professor of...
• EMR use: on the steep part of th