Highlights of the important and the interesting from the world of healthcare:
How do doctors use their smartphones? About 6 in 10 doctors use smartphones, mostly in the ways you’d expect–checking e-mail and the web–but some also use smartphones for e-detailing, which translates to less time spent in face-to-face meetings with drug reps. The survey of 11,000 doctors also revealed that use of electronic health records has risen rapidly in the last two years–to 52 percent for specialists (up 10 percentage points) and 50 percent for primary care (up 12 percentage points), however it didn’t say how many access EHR systems from their phones. Nonetheless, taken together the numbers suggest a large and lucrative market for mobile EHR developers.
Dying isn’t cheap: Out-of-pocket healthcare spending in the last year of life amounted to $11,618 on average, a recent study showed. That may seem like a lot, but the top 1 percent spends a whopping $94,000 in the last year of life, nearly double the yearly income of the average American household.
The Healthcare Payments Industry Has a Perception Problem
Healthcare payments are no longer about transactions. It’s about controlling the revenue cycle. And increasingly, that control is not sitting with ISOs.
For the needle-phobic: A pain-free vaccine patch made up of 100 “microneedles” could be a welcome drug delivery method for children (and adults) who are afraid of needles. So far it’s only been tested on mice and will take years, at least, before it’s widely available to humans.
The new venture world: Consider venture heavyweights Draper Fisher Jurvetson the latest victims of the shrinking venture capital industry, though that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. The firm raised $350 million for its latest fund, after having targeted $600 million for the fund two years ago.
Things could be worse: As much as we might like to take jabs at the woefully expensive and inefficient U.S. healthcare system, we should still be thankful for what we have. It’s a lot worse in the Stalinesque Cold War-era relic that is North Korea, with doctors sometimes performing amputations without anesthesia and working by candlelight in hospitals lacking essential medicine, heat and power.
Entrepreneurs’ dysfunctions: Psychology Today has a list of 12 common dysfunctions that entrepreneurs fall prey to, including usual suspects like failure to evolve and failure to understand the importance of culture. Also included are less-common bits of advice such as the fallacies of playing “prevent offense” and using the carrot-and-stick approach to incentivize innovation.
Inside an Automated Healthcare Practice: Redesigning Care Around People, Not Paperwork
By reducing administrative burden and redesigning workflows around human needs, it creates space for what matters most: connection between clinicians and patients.
Photo from flickr user gabofr