Health Care Business

Written by Jill Kinch, MSN, APN

As the nation celebrates Nurses Week (today-Sunday), we recognize the contributions of all nurses as compassionate caregivers, clinicians and leaders whom Tennesseans historically have relied on for high-quality health management and prevention. We also celebrate the opportunities for nurses to contribute even more significantly to the transformation of health management by improving access to affordable care.

We have an access to care problem in Tennessee, and nurses can help. The Update to the Health Care Safety Net Report, prepared by the Tennessee Department of Health, provides an assessment of health care resources including “the array of services, adequacy of services and access to care.” During the 2010-11 fiscal year, this report designated 78 of 95 counties in Tennessee as medically underserved.

Economic factors influence individuals’ access to care. The United Health Foundation states that the effect of poverty on overall health has been well-documented. “Poverty directly influences a family’s ability to meet the basic needs of their children including lack of access to health care.” According to a 2012 report from America’s Health Rankings, 22 percent of children in Tennessee are living below the poverty line. Nurses are ready and willing to contribute and meet the needs of these vulnerable populations.

Nurses have a legacy of providing high-quality care in amazingly diverse settings and specialties. From acute care hospitals to skilled nursing facilities, community and public health clinics, behavioral health and substance abuse facilities, schools and churches, triage call centers, prisons, retail clinics and patients’ homes, nurses are the foundation of our health care systems. Wherever nurses practice, their expertise supports patients’ journeys to optimal wellness and independence. This is challenging work, but few professionals are able to connect and establish trust with another person in such a profound and humbling way.

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Data anaytics firm specializing in oncology sets out to give cancer doctors access to more meaningful data from a larger cancer patient population and make them more connected.

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One of the biggest frustrations cancer doctors have is feeling like they’re the only ones treating cancer, according to Nathaniel Turner, co-founder of cancer data analytics startup Flatiron Health. He and co-founder Zachary Weinberg are about to start the second of a two year pilot program to create a virtual tumor board of sorts by giving physicians access to more meaningful data from a larger patient population.

The long-term goal is to give them a better sense of the best treatment options for their cancer patients depending on the type of cancer they have. ..

Turner points out that only roughly 4 percent of cancer patients are in clinical trials. Its solution is designed to retrieve data from the remaining 96 percent and improve clinical trial participation. Data analytics in the context of cancer would seem a strangely specific place for a couple of advertising technology professionals to enter, albeit successful advertising professionals who sold their business Invite Media to Google in 2010. Turner and Weinberg are intimately familiar with the challenges cancer patients face from friends and family and are strongly motivated to use technology to knock down silos and improve data transparency for oncology professionals. Turner points out that advertising technology is practically stratospheric next to healthcare IT and believe they can advance the quality of technology. ...

From a content perspective, your brand strategy should be more like that of media companies, because media companies are content engines.

From a content perspective, brands need to think like media companies, because media companies are content engines. They produce relevant and recent content day in and day out. The content is omnipresent (meaning it’s everywhere) and internally, media companies are agile – they can get things done quickly and efficiently.

Brands can’t just turn the “media company” button on an expect operations to change overnight. They must deploy a social business strategy to make this change successful – people, process and technology. The rest of the slides focus on the content operations of becoming a media company. Enjoy :

< slideshare preso > embedded in blog.

The Official Blog of HealthEconomics.Com

The passage of the ACA in 2010 has to feel like a high-water mark for proponents of preventive medicine. The Obama health reform essentially makes free preventive care the law of the land, with insurers required to completely cover the cost of a laundry list of interventions intended to avert dreaded chronic illnesses like diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. The rationale for this policy, often repeated, is that the chronically ill account for 75% of health care spending. Manage their illnesses more effectively through evidence-based treatments and lower-cost non-specialist providers, the argument goes, and you’ll solve health care’s cost crisis, as well as creating a healthier population.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this concept. For one, it directly contradicts the mandate for evidence-based care that most of these folks support: there’s almost no evidence suggesting that these screening interventions have any benefit to patients. A common refrain to this is that engaging patients via preventive screening makes them more conscious of the need for self-management. But this is also unproven: a decade or so ago, “disease management” was a fad that fell short of expectations (as most health policy fads do). In many ways, the push for preventive care is of the “we don’t know what to do, but we have to do something” variety.

But preventive medicine’s problems with comparative effectiveness don’t end there..... 

The mobile health market is growing like a weed these days. According to mHealthWatch and eHealth Initiative, there are 31,000 health and medical-related apps on the market today.

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Simplee first launched its medical wallet back in 2011 to help people better manage their healthcare financials — to track visits, monitor benefits and pay bills online, for example.

Considering how expensive healthcare can be, and what a pain in the ass it is to manage, people are eager to find any way to streamline the process and reduce costs — to their sanity and their wallet. By making this appeal to consumers, Simplee has been able to find some traction: Today, it processes millions of dollars in payments each month across “thousands of medical providers” and has managed $2 billion in medical bills since launch.

Earlier this year, the startup expanded its service, bringing a B2B-style payment and loyalty platform to hospitals to allow them to distribute digital bills, among other things. The idea being to offer hospitals a medical wallet that can, on the one hand, help them increase revenues, while making it easier to deliver new features and a better billing experience for patients on the other....

All information from a "Health Affairs briefing" with presentations, slides, MP3 audio..

The journey of assisted fertility (conceiving a baby through medical assistance) is a lonely and stressful one...a roller coaster of challenging emotions that,

Diabetes factsheet from WHO providing key facts and information on types of diabetes, symptoms, common consequences, economic impact, diagnosis and treatment, WHO response. Updated March 2013.

The European Health Report maps health trends over time, and charts progress towards achieving health goals across the Region’s 53 countries and nearly 900 million people.

The American Diabetes Association (Association) released new research today estimating the total costs of diagnosed diabetes have risen to $245 billion in 2012 from $174 billion in 2007, when the cost was last examined.

Some of the world's richest internet entrepreneurs, including Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, have awarded 11 disease researchers $3m (£1.9m) each.

Nine of the recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences are based at US institutions. The other two are from the Netherlands and Japan.

Many of the winners work on cell genetics and how it relates to disease.

One of the sponsors, genetics company founder 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki, said the winners should be household names.

In addition to Mr Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan and Ms Wojcicki, the prize is sponsored Ms Wojcicki's husband Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and Yuri Milner, a Russian entrepreneur.

Mr Milner, along with the new foundation's chair, Arthur Levinson, a former chief executive at a biotech company and current chairman of Apple, chose the prize winners.

Cornelia Bargmann, a winner from Rockefeller University, told the website Fast Company that she initially thought it was a practical joke or an internet scam.

"The scale of this is so outsized I think it will have a huge impact on the life sciences," Ms Bargmann said.

From 2014 on, the foundation will award $3m to five scientists each year. There is no age restriction on the prize and past winners can win again.

The 2013 winners are:

Cornelia Bargmann of Rockefeller University, for the genetics of neural circuits and behaviourDavid Botstein of Princeton University, for the mapping of inherited disease in humansLewis Cantley of Weill Cornell Medical College, for the discovery of an enzyme and its role in cancer metabolismHans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands, for describing how problems in signalling molecules can cause cancerNapoleone Ferrara of the University of California, San Diego, for discoveries on tumour growth that have led to therapies for some kinds of cancer and eye diseaseTitia de Lange of Rockefeller University, for research on telomeres, the protective tips on the ends of chromosomes, and how they relate to cancerEric Lander of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for the discovery of ways to identify human disease genesCharles Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, for targeted therapy for cancer genesBert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, for research on genes that suppress tumoursRobert Weinberg of MIT, who discovered the first human gene that when mutated causes cancerShinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, for work on developing artificially derived stem cells

Technology has revolutionized how we stay healthy and in shape. Over the next five years, wearable devices in sports and fitness will grow to 169.5 million devices, with the body becoming an input/output device where everything can be tracked. Digital health is one of the fastest growing markets in consumer electronics, and at this year’s CES, more than 215 exhibitors will showcase how technology can enhance the way we maintain our health and well-being. CES will also host several conference tracks and TechZonesdevoted to digital health and fitness.

 
Read more: http://blog.ce.org/index.php/2012/12/17/2013-ces-technology-for-your-phone-your-home-and-your-health/#ixzz2LK0KDIZ3

(Translated by me:)

Amsterdam

For the vast majority of hospitals  in the Netherlands, it will not yet be impossible  for the time being to dsitribute possible profits from their return on investement. The Dutch government tightened the rules for distribution so far, that not even a quarter of the hospitals at this time will be enabled to comply.

The Ministers agreed Friday with the stricter formulation of the bill. This means, among other things, that a hospital may distribute profits only if the solvency (capital against total assets) is at least 20%. Unrealized gains, eg from the revaluation of property, are also excluded.

The accounts of the hospitals for 2011 shows that at that time barely a quarter of the 92 hospitals had a solvency ratio of 20%. The average solvency in the sector was 15%.

The previous government had already determined that a distribution  of profit would only be possible after a review by the Health Care Inspectorate, and that a period of three years upon the initial investement is conditioned before actual payment of  the benefit. At the insistence of the PvdA (labour) coalition partner, additional requirements on top of this have now been set.

The ability to distribute profit should make it easier to hospitals to attract money from investors like pension funds. At the moment, the sector is almost entirely dependent on the banks.