People who either have no health insurance or rely on Medicaid are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced cancers than people who have private health insurance, according to a report from the American Cancer Society report. This finding follows an earlier study that showed uninsured patients with cancer were 60 percent more likely to die than insured cancer patients.
As a healthcare management consultant, Barry Calogero helps healthcare organizations plan for the future. In this interview, Barry discusses his predictions for healthcare in 2008 and beyond.
Earlier this month, I escaped to the beach with my husband and his BlackBerry. The BlackBerry and I did everything together. We read books on the beach, drank fruity drinks, and dined at water's edge. Yes, my husband was attached to the BlackBerry somewhere, but for the most part, it was just me and the little guy in blue.
I'm not completely innocent of PDA abuse. I've been known to take a look during especially long meetings or at conferences when the content seems particularly dry. Like everyone, I've read the negative press about PDAs--the risks of being "over-connected" and the prevalence of the "BlackBerry thumb." But an article I read in this month's Harvard Business Review might be the most compelling anti-PDA argument I've seen.
Titled "The BlackBerry Ate My Accountability," the article argues that PDAs have become "excuse technology"--enabling users to transfer responsibility to electronic devices and away from themselves.
The article references a 2007 congressional subcommittee hearing in which the U.S. General Services Administration was being investigated for holding brown bag lunches at which GSA appointees were inappropriately urged to use their positions to elect Republicans. When interviewed under oath, GSA head Lurita Doan said she didn't know what went on at the lunches because, although she'd attended, she wasn't paying attention--she was on her BlackBerry when the supposed untoward behavior took place.
Who hasn't sat in a meeting with a colleague stuck to his PDA? I usually shrug these people off as either very busy or exceptionally rude, but this HBR article suggests it runs deeper than that. Is the PDA an accepted way to avoid involvement and future blame? If you spend meetings e-mailing, you never have to go out on a limb with an idea or an unpopular opinion. You don't have to agree or disagree, and ultimately, you can't be held accountable for any decisions made because you, after all, were busy answering e-mails.
Healthcare is a 24-hour industry, and PDAs enable leaders to stay connected all the time. While executives use personal devices to report and investigate patient safety breakdowns, compliance issues, and staffing incidences, senior leaders shouldn't spend so much time looking down that they miss what's going on around them. Physicians who use PDAs to update patient data, look up specific information about a disease or condition, and file prescriptions must ensure that they spend patient visits looking at patients rather than personal devices.
And if a meeting isn't important enough to require attendees' full attention, the meeting shouldn't happen. Nowhere is accountability as important as in healthcare; don't let technology undermine yours.
Molly Rowe is leadership editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at mrowe@healthleadersmedia.com.
The American College of Physicians, a 124,000-member group that is the nation's largest for doctors of internal medicine, is calling on the federal government to ease its strict ban on marijuana as medicine and hasten research into the drug's therapeutic uses. The association contends that the long and rancorous debate over marijuana legalization has obscured good science demonstrating the benefits and medicinal promise of cannabis.
In a public-private partnership to help thousands of seniors struggling to pay for prescription drugs, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley plans to announce today a deal with CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield to help cover those caught in a Medicare gap. The agreement would help seniors bridge the "doughnut hole," a much criticized cost-saving measure built into the Medicare prescription drug benefit passed by Congress in 2003. The program covers annual prescription costs up to a certain amount and costs above a higher threshold, but not those in between, leaving a hole in the middle of the coverage plan.
Pharmacy benefits manager Caremark has agreed to pay Washington nearly $1.7 million as part of a $41 million multistate settlement of claims that it encouraged doctors to switch patients' prescriptions while representing that the switch would save patients money. In some cases, the patients or their health plans ended up paying more. And sometimes patients incurred more costs when they switched, because new drug therapies required additional tests or doctor's visits, according to the state's complaint. Caremark got rebates and discounts from drug manufacturers for switching patients to different drugs and didn't clearly disclose how it would affect a patient's cost, the state alleged. Caremark denied any wrongdoing but agreed to change its business practices.
A day after New York's attorney general took aim at UnitedHealth Group's healthcare reimbursement procedures, the ultimate financial implications for the nation's largest insurer were yet to come into focus. But there is little doubt that Andrew Cuomo's probe has handed company executives a significant distraction and a bit of a black eye. Although some analysts believe UnitedHealth will continue to operate with minimal bottom-line effect during Cuomo's fledgling inquiry and expected lawsuit, the consensus is far from unanimous.
Almost two-thirds of South Florida residents believe that uninsured Americans should be able to get healthcare, but even more are concerned about rising healthcare costs, problems with prescription drug coverage and the safety and quality of care. Those were the results of a Gallup poll of 401 residents conducted in late January for the Center for Excellence in Government, which presented the results at a town hall meeting at the University of Miami.
California for the first time is requiring that hospitals report to local health authorities certain kinds of staph infections that result in death or a stay in the intensive-care unit. Until now, there has been no state requirement for reporting staph infections. As a result, disease trackers have had a hard time calculating the severity of the problem. The new reporting requirement, however, is limited to cases that start outside hospitals or nursing homes in otherwise healthy people--leaving out about 85 percent of life-threatening encounters with the most feared bug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
A growing amount of research is investigating whether small cultural differences--most of them between white, male doctors and their diverse patients--could be a big reason for the nation's persistent healthcare disparities. New Jersey became the first state to require cultural-competence education for physicians to get licenses. California requires continuing medical education for doctors to include cultural and linguistic competency training.
