Every week, MedCity News highlights the best of its MedCitizens: syndication partners and MedCity News readers who discuss life science current events on MedCityNews.com.
Now here’s the best of what YOU had to say:
How EHRs can help Berwick’s 5 reasons for waste in healthcare spending. “Last week, Don Berwick completed his 17 month tenure as administrator of Medicare and Medicaid…In his parting interview with the press, he noted that 20 percent to 30 percent of health spending is ‘waste’ that yields no benefit to patients…Certainly regulatory reform is needed, but electronic health records can go far to addressing each of these issues.”
The Power Behind Enterprise EHR Software for Large Healthcare Systems
Enterprise EHR boosts scalability, interoperability, and governance for large healthcare systems.
The medical field is a-changin’ — should how we teach doctors change, too? “Will our medical students be better served to learn more medicine, or should they be shifting their focus to business in an effort to forward themselves? Who will doctors find themselves serving more, their patients or their employers? Will the greatest challenge in health care be promoting life or will it be to promote a death with dignity and without expensive end-of-life care? How will doctors be paid: by salary? By specialty? Or maybe by an obscure, non-transparent concocted “work unit” that an outside hospital consultant group creates?”
2 policies causing Medicare costs to be passed to the insured. “Everyone who’s looked at the data knows that the cost of Medicare is killing the federal budget. The Medicare payroll tax only covers about half the direct costs, with the rest coming from general expenditures. But as HealthLeaders points out, an increase in cost shifting from Medicare onto commercial plans may also be taking place.”
Is your healthcare startup’s data secure? “Hacking isn’t an issue that’s going away. As a small healthcare business owner, your best defense is to know what the stakes are and take preventive steps to decrease the odds of a security breach ever occurring. In the case of your data security, a good plan isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.”
Easy to measure quality healthcare treatment? Think again. “Under the government’s new program, hospitals could be financially responsible for the cost of medical care that a patient requires for up to 90 days after discharge. One can imagine why this provokes angst with hospital administrators. It’s easier to defend the government’s concept if a heart attack patient is discharged prematurely and is readmitted two days later with congestive heart failure. The case is harder to argue is a stroke patient falls at a rehab facility 2 months after discharge and needs to be hospitalized.”
The Hidden Administrative Tasks Draining Small Practices
Small practices play a critical role in healthcare delivery, but they cannot continue to absorb ever-increasing administrative demands without consequences.
Deanna Pogorelc is a Cleveland-based reporter who writes obsessively about life science startups across the country, looking to technology transfer offices, startup incubators and investment funds to see what’s next in healthcare. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ball State University and previously covered business and education for a northeast Indiana newspaper.
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