WorldHealthCareBlog.org

Will the “Moment of Complexity” Be Coming to Health Care?

Fred Fortin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:15:39 +0000

Image via Wikipedia Mark C. Taylor’s intriguing book, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, is one of those brilliant boiling pot examinations of social theories and philosophy which forces one to think and re-think where we are heading in this new flat world. Of course, when confronted with such intellectual challenges, my initial thoughts are [...]

Health Care Challenges in the “Post-American World”

Fred Fortin — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:07:08 +0000

Fareed Zakaria argues in his new book “The Post-American World“, that the problem America faces in the new emerging international sphere is not so much domestic decline, but rather more “the rise of the rest.” By this he means that countries all over the world “have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once [...]

Coming to Health Care: The Challenge of Privacy 2.0

Fred Fortin — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:50:29 +0000

Lawrence Lessig wrote in Free Culture, that “privacy was assured because of the inefficient architecture for gathering data and hence a market constraint (cost) on anyone who wanted that data.” Privacy was guaranteed to us by a kind of economic “friction” and system inertia. Today that friction has all but disappeared and the privacy protection [...]

EHM Strategy: Management, Marketing, or Empowerment?

Scott MacStravic — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:40:29 +0000

In the early years of employee health management (EHM), beginning in the 1970s, employers understandably used a management approach to their efforts to improve the health of their workforces. Initially, employer-sponsored efforts almost always involved health promotion or wellness initiatives, aimed at improving overall health and fitness, with specific initiatives aimed at weight loss, smoking [...]

Health Plans Taking Over Health Management?

Scott MacStravic — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:42:57 +0000

In the early days of health management (HM), whether for employees (EHM) or insured populations (PHM), insurers were among early adopters of the outsourcing approach thereto. Since insurance plans had plenty of work to do in marketing their offerings, paying claims, and managing utilization of care, they were quite willing to outsource HM to the [...]

Selecting Targets for Population Health Management

Scott MacStravic — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:49:16 +0000

Conventional wisdom in PHM has long adhered to the notion made famous by Willy Sutton, the famous robber, who explained his predilection for robbing banks by noting that they are where the money is. Translated into PHM terms, it leads to identifying those people – members of health plans and employees – who cost the [...]

The Name of the Game in PHM is Variability: Part 9 - Implications

Scott MacStravic — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:08:22 +0000

Given the large number of PHM suppliers already available, and growing numbers of hospitals, physicians, and other suppliers joining still, the number of options across the seven elements of PHM is enormous. If there were as few as five options available for each element, to say nothing of different mixes of elements for the same [...]

The Name of the Game in PHM Is Variability: Part 8 - Evaluation

Scott MacStravic — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:06:46 +0000

To a great degree, the evaluation element in PHM comprises repetition of one or more of the assessments done for the initial baseline analysis. Ideally, this repetition, whenever it is repeated, will identify the changes of concern to payers, at least, while any added tracking of results used to sustain participants in their efforts and [...]

The New Place for Health Care is Everywhere

Scott MacStravic — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:46:15 +0000

In a previous article on the move toward increasing the places where health care is delivered, I noted a wide variety of additional locations where health care organizations (HCOs) are making care available. But the trend is even greater than I indicated. As reported in another earlier article by George van Antwerp, at least one [...]

The Name of the Game in PHM Is Variability: Part 7 - Sustaining

Scott MacStravic — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:14:20 +0000

Once targets are enrolled, i.e. as many choose to opt in or fail to opt out, there remains the next challenge of sustaining their participation, in terms of frequency and duration of interactions, cooperation in pursuing the intervention goal, and making behavior changes – and completing or continuing in the intervention, depending on which applies. [...]