Panel recommending changes to military health care, benefits – Video

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Panel recommending changes to military health care, benefits
U.S. officials say an independent commission is recommending broad changes to the military #39;s retirement and health care systems that could save more than $20 billion over the next four years....

By: ABC 10 News

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Panel recommending changes to military health care, benefits - Video

Matthew Kellway – Petititons – Ensure Dignity for Veterans (2015 01 30) – Video

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Matthew Kellway - Petititons - Ensure Dignity for Veterans (2015 01 30)
Matthew rose in the House today to present a petition to ensure dignity for Canada #39;s veterans. The signatories to the petition want to note that Canadian Forces veterans and their families...

By: mattkellway

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Matthew Kellway - Petititons - Ensure Dignity for Veterans (2015 01 30) - Video

HCA 497 WEEK 1 DQ 1 U.S. HEALTH CARE SYSTEM VS. OTHER COUNTRIES – Video

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HCA 497 WEEK 1 DQ 1 U.S. HEALTH CARE SYSTEM VS. OTHER COUNTRIES
http://www.seetutorials.com/hca-497/hca-497-week-1-dq-1-u-s-health-care-system-vs-other-countries/ Compare and contrast the U.S. health care system with that of another country. What are some...

By: Nicolas Blair

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HCA 497 WEEK 1 DQ 1 U.S. HEALTH CARE SYSTEM VS. OTHER COUNTRIES - Video

Functional Medicine: A unique approach to managing and supporting chronic illness & pain – Video

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Functional Medicine: A unique approach to managing and supporting chronic illness pain
Beyer Natural Health Solutions Clinic treats the whole patient. We combine functional medicine and functional neurology in the management and support of the chronic illness and chronic pain....

By: Beyer Natural Health Solutions

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Functional Medicine: A unique approach to managing and supporting chronic illness & pain - Video

Health care speed dating: a new way to find Dr. Right

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Is health care speed-dating the way to find the doctor of your dreams?

Florida Medical Center in Lauderdale Lakes will be hosting a free event on Valentine's Day to let prospective patients meet physicians through a rotating series of five-minute conversations. Once a bell rings, the person will move on to the next doctor.

"With the speed-dating method, people get a chance to sit down with us rather than coming into an office and being intimidated by a bunch of people in white coats," said Dr. Ali Shahriari, a thoracic and cardiac surgeon who is participating in the event. "It's like going to a party and meeting a doctor."

Shahriari said communication between doctor and patient sometimes flounders today as physician practices get busier and technology takes over face-to-face discussions. "We are losing that connection that has been part of the physician-patient relationship for centuries," he said.

Set during the hospital's annual Heart Health Fair, the one-hour speed-dating event will begin at 10:30 a.m. and feature about five specialists including cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and an OB/GYN. Anyone not interested in finding a new doctor can use their allotted time to get medical advice, said Shahriari, who's also medical director of the center's Aortic Disease Institute.

While "speed-dating" may be an offbeat approach, experts say it's one more modern way that consumers can get valuable information before picking a health care provider.

"I give them credit, it's an innovative thing to do," said Dr. John Santa, director of the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center. "My doctor colleagues might be disturbed by [the dating event]. But, hey, five minutes of face-to-face conversation is better than nothing."

The nonprofit Consumer Reports offers ratings for heart surgeons, hospitals, health insurance and other health care products for a fee.

The key, Santa said, is for consumers to ask hard questions. Among them: Can I see the results of satisfaction surveys? Can I see my test and lab results? Does your practice have any relationship with drug or medical device companies?

Having good rapport and communication between doctor and patient is important, said Dr. Stephen Babic, president of the Palm Beach County Medical Society.

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Health care speed dating: a new way to find Dr. Right

Atrius part of national health-care task force

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By Andy Metzger

State House News Service

BOSTON -- With 75 percent of its business already coming from "value-based" alternatives to the fee-for-service payment model, Atrius Health believes it has the experience to help guide policy recommendations as part of a new national group aimed at bettering health care.

"We have always been there, back to the founding," said Emily Brower, executive director of Atrius Accountable Care Programs.

Accountable-care organizations take on the responsibility for providing health care without the a-la-carte payment method, and many in the health-policy world see them as a vehicle to encourage more efficient and better care. The Newton-based health-care provider group joined the new Health Care Transformation Task Force, which aims to improve outcomes and efficiency in the health field.

Brower told the News Service organizations seeking to provide "value-based" health must first have a "foundation" of quality services and look for gaps in their infrastructure for treating particular maladies.

"That can be hard to put that together," said Brower. She said when other providers move toward "value-based" delivery "that helps us tremendously," and she said payers have "absolutely" become more amenable to that model of payment.

Atrius was formed in 2004 and consisted of Dedham Medical Associates, Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, Southboro Medical Group and South Shore Medical Center.

Partners HealthCare, the largest provider organization in Massachusetts, announced Wednesday it would increase its "value-based" business from 50 percent to 75 percent in its primary-care operations over the next five years. Partners is also part of the task force, which set the 75 percent goal.

Brower said high-deductible health-insurance plans can mesh with the aims of accountable-care organizations as long as they do not discourage patients from seeking preventative care.

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Atrius part of national health-care task force

Health Care Cost Studies Pointedly Ignore Bad Incentives, Market Failure as Drivers

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An Academy Health Blog post last week set both Lamberts and my something is wrong with this picture alarm bells ringing. The article, How coverage and technology interact, cites mainstream, widely-cited studies on what allegedly drives health care cost increases. Here are the opening paragraphs:

As I posted previously, many studies have pointed to technology as a principal driver of health care spending growth. Those studies also credit third party payment (i.e., insurance) and income for some of the blame too. More interesting, coverage, income, and technology interact; their intersection is explored in a few papers summarized below.

The 2009 paper in Health Affairs by Shelia Smith, Joseph Newhouse, and Mark Freeland is one of the sources for the chart above. (See this post for additional detail.) In it, the authors note that interrelationships among technology, income, and insurance are strong, which makes it difficult to assign specific quantitative magnitudes to each factor.

Burton Weisbrods fascinating 1991 paper, The Health Care Quadrilemma, may have been the first to deeply contemplate the insurance-technology nexus. In it, he explained how the expansion of health insurance has paid for the development of cost-increasing technologies, and how the new technologies have expanded demand for insurance. Weisbrod recognized that the key linkage is the research and development (R&D) process

This sort of thing drives me to despair. Go look at that chart. How can you begin to pretend that those categories are mutually exclusive? They arent even remotely, as even the snippet of the post Ive provided demonstrates, and youll see even more proof if you read it in its entirety. So what is the point of engaging in the pretense of quantification when the explanatory variables are not at all discrete drivers?

And what should really get you skeptical is the vague term technology. What does that mean? Is a new drug technology? Even if so, what about all the new drugs (via FDA classification as new drug applications) that are merely exercises in intellectual property rent seeking? The overwhelming majority of NDAs (Ive seen estimates of 88%) are not new drugs at all but merely minor reformulations, like an extended release version, that allow patent life to be extended and for price increases (the new version is pushed hard to doctors and always priced higher than the existing version).

But we dont even have to get that granular. It turns out that technology is the error bar, all of the not explained otherwise factors. No, I am not making that up. From the 2009 Health Affairs paper cited above:

The conclusion that technological change explains much of the growth rests on a macroeconomic approach that seeks to estimate the contribution of known factors to health spending growth and assumes that most of the unexplained residual growth is attributable to technology.

Go look back and look at the chart again. How much faith can you put in an analysis where far and away the biggest single factor, in most cases accounting for roughly 50% of the total, is what you cant otherwise explain? And worse, the researchers call it technology which makes it sound virtuous!

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Health Care Cost Studies Pointedly Ignore Bad Incentives, Market Failure as Drivers

U.S. to analyze DNA from 1 million people

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(MENAFN - Al-Anbaa) The United States has proposed analyzing genetic information from more than 1 million American volunteers as part of a new initiative to understand human disease and develop medicines targeted to an individual's genetic make-up. At the heart of the "precision medicine" initiative, announced on Friday by President Barack Obama, is the creation of a pool of people - healthy and ill, men and women, old and young - who would be studied to learn how genetic variants affect health and disease.

Officials hope genetic data from several hundred thousand participants in ongoing genetic studies would be used and other volunteers recruited to reach the 1 million total.

"Precision medicine gives us one of the greatest opportunities for new medical breakthroughs we've ever seen," Obama said, promising that it would "lay a foundation for a new era of life-saving discoveries."

The near-term goal is to create more and better treatments for cancer, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told reporters on a conference call on Thursday. Longer term, he said, the project would provide information on how to individualize treatment for a range of diseases.

The initial focus on cancer, he said, reflects the lethality of the disease and the significant advances against cancer that precision medicine has already made, though more work is needed.

The effort may raise alarm bells for privacy rights advocates who have questioned the government's ability to guarantee that DNA information is kept anonymous.

Obama promised that "privacy will be built in from day one."

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U.S. to analyze DNA from 1 million people