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Customer service in healthcare
Great post by Lisa Suennen this week on the two different worlds of acute disease care and aesthetic medicine. It reminds us that there are really two quite distinct worlds in the US healthcare...
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Best outcomes or most cost effective healthcare?
I have been thinking for a while now that one of the problems with the dialog about improving the US healthcare system is that we have done a poor job of articulating what we want to accomplish. Do we...
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Hospitals bent the cost curve in the 90′s
Hospital Expenditures and Physician and Clinical Expenditures are the two largest categories of the NHE (National Health Expenditure), comprising 51% in 2010. Intriguingly, while these cost categories...
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Quality and Customer Satisfaction are different
Nice post today by Jaan Sidorov pointing out the difference between patient satisfaction and medical quality. Expanding on some earlier themes (here and here), there are at least three important...
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Managed care returns?
My last post on healthcare costs looked at how hospital and professional healthcare costs were held flat during the nineties. In todays WSJ, an article asserts this was due largely to managed care, and...
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Democratization of healthcare innovation: Stethocloud
Here is a summer story that is a counterpoint to the daily gloom and doom in the news. It’s about healthcare innovation, unlocked by some of my favorite trends: democratization of innovation; low-cost...
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Who pays for US healthcare?
It’s a truism to say that “Patients don’t pay for healthcare” in the USA. And historically, new ventures based on the idea that patients would pay out of their own pockets for healthcare innovations...
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Petri dish for innovation: Consumer driven health?
I’ve written before about the idea that segments of the healthcare system where patients pay for themselves may be a fertile focus for innovation because of the tight connection between “who pays” and...
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Emergence of the 401(k) health plan?
401(K) 2012 The idea that health insurance might follow the trajectory of retirement finance, with employer-covered insurance moving toward a defined contribution, 401(k)-style approach, rather than...
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Pre-existing conditions and the future of US healthcare
“Pre-existing conditions” are (should be?) at the heart of the debate about the two approaches to reforming healthcare financing on display from our Presidential candidates. I found this article by...
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How Crowdfunding pushes the bounds of what can be funded
I just backed a new project on Kickstarter that I consider a fascinating experiment. Who knows how well it will work, but if you are interested in how Crowdfunding is changing the landscape of funding...
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Disease through the eyes of an accountant
There has been a lot written recently about how some diseases cost the healthcare system more than others, and the fact that some patients (the sick ones and the old ones) cost more than others. I...
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Disease cost drill down (1)
To be actionable, I felt it more useful to look at healthcare costs by specific clinical condition, rather than by the general disease groupings of my last post. Here is the graphic I came up with...
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Disease economics: heart disease
Color code for graphs below I wanted to see what insight I could gain by looking a bit deeper into the economics of specific diseases. I started with heart disease. As in prior posts on disease...
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Disease economics: Backpain
I was interested to see that Back problems are the ninth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at almost $40B / yr. I chose back pain as the second in my series on disease economics. Most...
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Disease economics: Asthma
Asthma and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) show up as the the fifth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at $60+ Billion / yr. (see footnotes for source etc). As with prior posts...
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Disease economics: COPD and Pneumonia
Following on from my last post on asthma, here are the economic details for the other two big respiratory disease expense categories: COPD and Pneumonia. To recap: Asthma: $16 B/yr; clinical condition...
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Invention risk makes lean science startups different
A hallmark of new ventures that are based on scientific advances in fields like medical devices, health tech, or cleantech is that they often have invention risk. Frequently they also have market risk....
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Web-based healthtech startups have invention risk. Surprise!
As readers of this blog know, I am interested in the potential of novel social networking and other internet-age techniques to transform our creaky healthcare system. A particularly intriguing class of...
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Copying what works to reduce healthcare costs
If, as a country, we cared about improving the ratio of quality to costs in our healthcare system, why wouldn’t we: Look for examples of things that already “work”, either in the USA or abroad; and...
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