Essays on Employee Health Benefits and Other Health Care Topics, Hosted by Brian Klepper
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 5/1/12 on Health Populi
You can now carry a doctor with you in your pocket. Two top telehealth companies that support online physician-patient visits have gone mobile. This upgrade was announced this week at the 2012 American Telemedicine Association conference, being held in San Jose, CA.
Continue reading “A Doctor’s Appointment on your Phone: Out of Beta and Into Your Pocket”
In 2010, nearly 50% of workers under 65 years of age worked for firms that did not offer health benefits. The uber-trend, first, is that the percentage of workers covered by employer-sponsored health insurance has declined since 2002. Workers offered the option of buying into a health benefit, as well as the percent covered by a health plan, have both fallen, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI), an organization that has long-tracked this trend. EBRI’s report on Employment-Based Health Benefits: Trends in Access and Coverage, 1997-2010, provides the details behind this declining picture.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 3/30/12 on Health Populi
It was Dr. Charles Safran who said, “Patients are the most under-utilized resource in the U.S. health system,” which he testified to Congress in 2004. Seven years later, patients are still under-utilized, not just in the U.S. but around the world.
Yet, “when patients have an active role in their own health care, the quality of their care, and of their care experience improves,” assert researchers from The Commonwealth Fund in their analysis of 2011 global health consumer survey data published in the April/June 2010 issue of the Journal of Ambulatory Care Management. This analysis is summarized inInternational Perspectives on Patient Engagement: Results from the 2011 Commonwealth Fund Survey, published on The Commonwealth Fund’s website on March 29, 2012.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
There’s a shift in power in health care moving away from providers and suppliers like pharma and medical device companies, toward patients and payers. This is the new health world according to Ernst & Young‘s latest Progressions report called, The third place: health care everywhere.
What’s underneath this tectonic shift is the need to bend that stubborn cost curve and address public health outcomes through behavior change. E&Y says look for new entrants, like retailers, IT companies, and telecomms, to be part of the solution beyond traditional health care stakeholders. These participants will be part of both delivery of care services and play an ever-important and -growing role in “value mining,” which E&Y defines as the use of data mining to determine the value of health interventions. THINK: comparative effectiveness through a lens of value-for-money and you get the picture.
The ability to get the data is the #1 obstacle that will slow the adoption of data analytics in health care, according to IBM’s report, The value of analytics in healthcare: from insights to outcomes.
Healthcare “high performers,” as IBM calls them, use data analytics for guiding future strategy, product research and development, and sales and marketing functions. 90% of healthcare CIOs told IBM that developing “insight and intelligence” were key focuses of their organizations over the next 3 to 5 years.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 2/12/12 on Health Populi
35% of consumers who have been altering their food intake to lose weight are eating fewer processed foods, according to a recent Nielsen Global Survey. This percentage has grown from 29% in 2008.
Health and wellness is one of three driving forces shaping food in 2012, according to JWT‘sWhat’s Cooking: Trends in Food. The other two forces, technology and foodie culture, combine with health/wellness and yield some interesting consumer trends in the milieu of food.
JWT’s top food issues to watch are:
Chronic illness represents $3 of every $4 of annual health spending in the U.S. That’s about $1.5 trillion.
– Adopting evidence-based interventions for disease preventionLiving Well With Chronic Illness, a report fromThe Institute of Medicine (IOM), issues a “call for public health action” to address chronic illness through:
– Developing new public policies to promote better living with chronic disease
– Building a comprehensive surveillance system that integrates quality of life measures, and
– Enhancing collaboration among health ecosystem stakeholders: health care, health, and community non-healthcare services.
Continue reading “Addressing Chronic Illness Can Help Cure The US Budget Deficit”
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 1/31/12 on Health Populi
Transparency and authenticity, constant and clear communication, and a drive toward value underpin the future health system — for those health leaders who can commit to these pillars of transformational change.
Leading Through Transformation: Top Healthcare CEOs’ Perspectives on the Future of Healthcare summarizes the interaction among 17 health execs who convened at the second CEO Forum held by Huron Healthcare Group. The report was released in January 2012.
Continue reading “From Volume to Value: How Health Execs See the Future of Health Care”
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 1/16/12 on Health Populi
Cue up the song “Hey Big Spender” from the Broadway hit, Sweet Charity, when you read the January 2012 AHRQ report with the long-winded title, The Concentration and Persistence in the Level of Health Expenditures over Time: Estimates for the U.S. Population, 2008-2009.”
The report’s headline is that 1% of the U.S. population consumed 20% of all health costs spent in the U.S. in 2008 and 2009, illustrated by the chart. These Big Health Spenders tend to be in poor or fair health, older, female, non-Hispanic whites and people with only publicly-provided health insurance. Their mean expenditure was $90,061.
The top 10% of U.S. health citizens accounts for nearly two-thirds of health spending in the U.S., with a mean expenditure of $23,992.
Continue reading “Hey Big Spender. 1% of US Citizens Incur 20% of All Health Cost”
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 1/10/12 on Health Populi
To doctors working in eight countries around the globe, the biggest benefit of health IT is better access to quality data for clinical access, followed by reducing medical errors, improving coordination of care across care settings, and improving cross-organizational workflow.
However, except for the issue of health IT’s potential to improve cross-organizational working processes, American doctors have lower expectations about these benefits than their peers who work in the 7 other nations polled in a global study from Accenture‘s Eight-Country Survey of Doctors Shows Agreement on Top Healthcare Information Technology Benefits, But a Generational Divide Exists. Accenture polled over 3,700 doctors working in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Singapore, Spain and the US.
Continue reading “US Doctors Less Sanguine About Health IT’s Benefits”
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 1/09/12 on Health Populi
Most U.S. primary care physicians realize the health of their patients is largely out of their hands — with their social needs ranking as important as addressing their medical conditions, according to the 2011 Physicians’ Daily Life Report, conducted on behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation by Harris Interactive in September-October 2011, results published in November 2011. In fact, unmet social needs are directly leading to worse health for Americans, say 9 in 10 doctors.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 12/20/11 on Health Populi
2012 will be a dynamic year for health information technology (health IT) in the U.S., which I outline in my annual health IT forecast in iHealthBeat, the online publication on technology and health care published by the California HealthCare Foundation. The full forecast can be found here.
The key headlines for you Reader’s Digest abridged fans are that:
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 12/14/11 on Health Populi
People enrolled in consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) are more likely than enrollees in traditional health insurance products to be cost-conscious. In particular, CDHP members check prices before they receive health care services, ask for generic drugs versus branded Rx’s, talk to doctors about treatment options and their costs, and use online cost-tracking tools.
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 12/13/11 on Health Populi
As we approach 2012, we health prognosticators like to forecast what we’ll likely see in 2012. One of the for-certain trends will be the uptake of telehealth programs, which will be publicly, privately, and jointly-funded. The business case is clear for telehealth, both in the U.S. and globally.
Jon Linkous, CEO of the American Telemedicine Association, told the mHealth Summit last week that, the “shift in the way healthcare is paid will put providers in driver’s seat when it comes to choosing the best way to deliver healthcare and whether or not to use telemedicine.”
The forces are converging for telehealth to grow, based on sound business models, in 2012.
Continue reading “UK Finds Telehealth Reduces Mortality by 45%; Telehealth’s Tipping Point is 2012”
Jane Sarasohn-Kahn
Posted 12/06/11 on Health Populi
On the face of the raw data, tbe good news from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on the nation’s employment picture was an additional 120,000 jobs in November. This drove the unemployment rate down to 8.6%. Underneath that number, though, remains what is still a shaky economy for both workers and those seeking full employment to match what they might have lost as a result of their layoffs.
Continue reading “Employees Predict Reduced Benefits in 2012; One-Half Expect Layoffs”
Care And Cost 