National Geographic’s most typical person
National Geographic’s year long series on world population highlights the differences and similarities of the Earth’s population as we reach 7 billion people in 2011.
22Jul
Employers’ Opportunity to Improve Health Care Results
Filed in Healthcare
No doubt health care costs continue to reduce the bottom line of many small businesses. Even after pushing vendors hard and changine plans every few years, costs continue to climb and health outcomes measured by employee absenteeism and chronic ailments are stagnant or falling.
Like it or not, businesses will continue to be in the business of providing healthcare plans to employees for some time to come. Therefore, businesses need to look at different ways to “get their money’s worth” when it comes to healthcare.
Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor, suggests it is time for employers to think in terms of value and focus on better outcomes.
Porter suggests employers adopt four principles for providing healthcare to employees:
First, the best way truly to reduce health care cost is to improve its quality. Quality, defined in terms of outcomes, is the secret to success in health care.
Second, high-value care is delivered by integrated practice units including all the needed specialties that care for the patient’s medical condition over the full cycle of care.
Third, prevention and screening can dramatically improve value, as does ongoing disease management to prevent recurrences and setbacks.
Fourth, the only way truly to drive value is to measure patient outcomes for each medical condition.
24May
A former pain in the neck
Filed in Healthcare | Science
What a relief. After 15 months of avoiding surgery to repair an increasing hierniation in my neck last week, Boulder Neurosurgery Association performed an Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion.
The outpatient procedure provided immediately relief to pain and numbness down my right arm into my thumb and forefinger.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
11Apr
Massachusetts’ Bold Healthcare Initiative
Filed in Economy | Healthcare | Management | USA politics
or overstepping the boundaries of government? Which of these best describes the recent “Healthcare for All” bill supported by an overwhelming majority of the Massachusetts Legislature (154 to 2 in the House and 37 to 0 in the Senate) and Govenor Mitt Romney? The plan’s objective is one shared by all concerned about the unisured, responsible quality healthcare for all. It differs from many other universal plans in several ways.
The bill requires individuals to provide personal coverage, just like the state’s laws on auto coverage. Massachusetts is the first state requiring individuals to have health insurance or prove they can self-insure.
In addition, the bill provides funds to make sure those eligible for Medicare and Medicaid are enrolled. It subsidies healthcare insurance for those who don’t qualify for government programs and can’t afford insurance. The state expects to pay for the subsidies out of a $1 billion fund set aside for providing healthcare for those who can’t afford it.
The bill currently requires employers to pay $295 per unisured employee. “That’s likely to be adjusted by me,” stated Governor Romney. Will he wield the line-item veto pen?
Joe Klein at Time Magazine describes the Romney Healthcare plan this way:
Massachusetts now spends about $1 billion a year to provide emergency health care for at least 500,000 uninsured citizens. About 200,000 of those are young people, predominantly male, who are making enough money to buy health insurance but figure they don’t need it. They would be required to buy a relatively inexpensive health insurance policy, with higher deductibles and co-pays—that’s where the “mandate” comes in. Another 100,000 are extremely poor people who are eligible for Medicaid; a concerted effort would be made to bring them into the system. The remaining 200,000 are the people who have been most neglected by the system in the past: the working poor, people who have low-end service jobs or work part time for employers who don’t offer health coverage.
According to USA Today, Mass. Gov. Romney’s health care plan says everyone pays , other healthcare proposals have focused on expanding government healtcare coverage for the poor and have largely failed. Romney put distance between his proposal and the Clinton plan, saying “we don’t need Hillary-care.”
In an article by The Washington Post, Mass. Bill Requires Health Coverage, the plan goes much farther than any other state but is by no means finalized. It leaves the task of determining exactly how much some low-income residents will pay for their new, more affordable policies to a new agency that would serve as a liaison between the government, policyholders and private insurance companies.
Because of that uncertainty, some still worry that the residents required to buy insurance would not be able to.
In any event, a creative approach which does not unduly burden employers or tax payers. As long as it does not place too great a burden on the poor, then it is a very good start.
05Sep
Medicaid Needs Agressive Treatment
Filed in Economy | Healthcare | USA politics
The McKinsey Quarterly: Intensive care for Medicaid:
“Every US policy maker knows that Medicaid presents vexing budget challenges, but a new analysis suggests that its costs are becoming truly unsustainable. McKinsey estimates that even after economic growth returns to a steady pace, this government health insurance program, which primarily serves the poor, will consume more than 75 percent of all new state revenues in 10 states, including Georgia, Indiana, and Oregon, by 2009. Medicaid will cost 11 other states, including Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania, from half to 75 percent of their incremental revenues (Exhibit 1). In an additional 22 states, this one program will consume 25 to 50 cents of each new tax dollar.”
13Aug
Can open source revolutionise biotech?
Filed in Biotechnology | Healthcare
THE computing industry has been transformed by open-source software, threatening business models while creating lucrative opportunities for some firms. Might the same happen in biotechnology? In a paper published in Nature on February 10th, a group of researchers describe a way to transfer genes into plants that bypasses the now most commonly used technique, agrobacterium transformation, which is protected by hundreds of patents. The new process may provide an alternative method of modifying certain types of crops in order to, say, improve harvests. But what makes the invention particularly notable is that the authors, affiliated with CAMBIA, a non-profit biotech research group in Australia, have made the procedure free for use under a novel “open-source†licence.
This licence allows people to commercialise products based on the procedure. All that is required is that improvements to the technique itself be shared, to the benefit of all users. This should make it easier for companies and researchers in poor countries to use agricultural gene-transfer technology, which today’s patent-licensing approach impedes.
‘The idea is to try to craft a system so that we have a different way to do business,’ says Richard Jefferson, the head of CAMBIA and a co-author of the paper. ‘This is a demonstration of a way forward for an innovation business model,’ he says, which could help unleash creativity in poorer countries. This week, the group also unveiled a website, BioForge.net, to help biotech researchers to collaborate, much as SourceForge.net is a nexus for open-source software development.
Although open-source approaches have already been used in biotech-related computing (called bioinformatics) and database sharing, CAMBIA’s licence represents an actual technique being provided in an open-source form. It is part of a broader push towards open practices in the life sciences. For example, Science Commons, an offshoot of Creative Commons (which provides less restrictive copyright licences to authors), is preparing to develop open licences later this year. “
04Mar
Worldwide Health Initiatives by Gates Foundation
Filed in Healthcare
The world’s richest charity confronts the health of the world’s poorest people
“THREE-QUARTERS of a billion dollars is a lot of almost anybody’s money. Almost anybody, that is, except Bill Gates. Even for him, though, it is more than small change. And that is the size of the donation announced on January 24th by the foundation that bears his name and that of Melinda, his wife. The money is going to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI).
The Gates foundation is the richest charity in the world. Its endowment is worth $28 billion. Its annual income is that of a small country. And its founders are on a mission. The more modest parts of that mission are to improve America’s schools and libraries and to benefit Mr Gates’s native region of the Pacific Northwest (charity, after all, begins at home). The most ambitious part, though, is to free the world—and, in particular, those regions of it that are poor—of ill health.”
Truly a noble undertaking. I was surprised to read this in an article after the tragic Asian Tsunami. An estimated 150,000 children in Africa die each month from malaria, he said.”We have the world’s eyes focused on the tsunami of the Indian Ocean, but the world continues to overlook the silent tsunamis of deaths from malaria which take every month the number of people that died in the… (Daily Herald)
30May
Do the Pharma Business Models Add Up?
Filed in Economy | Healthcare | Pharmaceuticals | USA politics
Do Pharmaceutical Companies Have an Effective Business Models?
Has the Pharmaceutical Blockbuster Model Gone Bust?
Bain & Company Press Release 12/8/2003
Rebuilding Big Pharma’s Business Model
In Vivo 11/1/2003
by James Gilbert, Preston Henske and Ashish Singh
The blockbuster business model that underpinned Big Pharma’s success is now irreparably broken. The industry needs a new approach.
23Jan
Reforming Healthcare: Cost vs. Price
Filed in Economy | Healthcare | USA politics
This posting by Kevin Brancato suggest that our view of healthcare cost in the US is distorted. While the data seems to lead to the conclusion that we’re buying much more healthcare at sky-high prices, economists doubt the validity and applicability of the offical data because it does not appropriately adjust for quality.
23Jan
10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World
Filed in Biotechnology | Economy | Healthcare | Technology
Technology Review unveils its annual selection of hot new technologies about to affect our lives in revolutionary ways—and profiles the innovators behind them.
Universal Translation
Synthetic Biology
Nanowires
Bayesian Machine Learning
T-Rays
Distributed Storage
RNA Interference
Power Grid Control
Microfluidic Optical Fibers
Personal Genomics