business strategy

How Six Sigma is holding back true innovation in healthcare

Today, most healthcare organizations operate in ways that are antithetical to innovation. The trend in patient-centered healthcare is to focus on stability, predictability, standardization and the avoidance of risk. Process engineers are deployed to help hospitals and healthcare systems eliminate waste and improve their organizations using Lean and Six-Sigma principles. Few operators develop an effective […]

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Hospital patient profiling plan reads like a Daily Show story

If this story didn’t have a Bloomberg byline, I would swear it was from last night’s edition of The Daily Show. Hospitals are now buying consumer purchasing data to figure out who smokes, who has a car, and who shops at Walmart or Whole Foods. The idea is to identify high-risk patients and help them […]

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Hospitals

Six simple strategies for building a physician leadership program

With all the hype about the importance of cultivating physician leadership, more organizations are engaging outside experts to help them build physician leadership development programs. Like many of the necessities brought on by health reform, this is a proposition that takes a significant investment on many levels. Building a leadership program internally is the best […]

Three advantages to leveraging claims data to forecast healthcare industry trends

By Robin Gelburd and John Wright As the ACA continues to drive rapid transformation throughout the healthcare industry, new decision risks are emerging for all of the stakeholders in this complex market. As industry players struggle to quantify the effects of current reforms on their business models, it is becoming evident that high-quality, unbiased claims […]

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Health IT

Athenahealth’s first inpatient product isn’t quite an EHR, but a ‘Trojan horse’ into hospitals

Athenahealth eventually will come out with an inpatient electronic health record, but for now, the Watertown, Mass.-based health IT vendor is content with bringing a clinical integration and communication engine into hospitals. At last month’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Orlando, Fla., Athenahealth introduced AthenaCoordinator Enterprise, which the company described as […]

Devices & Diagnostics

Cardiocom acquisition shows Medtronic is serious about expanding from devices to data

When Medtronic announced its acquisition of Cardiocom  earlier this week,  it was a big (and loud) move in shaping the company’s “now we’re a healthcare service provider”  strategy. But Cardiocom  only makes $40 to $50 million in revenue, relatively small potatoes for a titan like Medtronic. What does this announcement mean, really, then?  “The importance […]

MedCity Influencers

Is Brazil an emergent health IT market yet?

Brazil in all accounts has been categorized as an  emerging  market. However, is  its  healthcare market ready for a  sustainable  information technology transformation yet? A 21st century goal of a sustainable healthcare IT infrastructure will require crucial IT infrastructural implementations before hospitals and all other stakeholders in a national wide scale can benefit from information […]