News Room
Healthcare News To Use
Wasteful spending accounts for $1.2 Trillion in healthcare costs (Fierce Healthcare, 03/04/10)
..Another contributor to waste is how a doctor decides to care for a patient. The variety of treatment options account for an estimated $10 billion of unnecessary cost each year, according to the report…”The old belief that better care is more care, turns out it’s just not true,” James said. “Most of the savings go back to insurers or the government. We’re nearly always financially punished every time we save money.”
GAO Report: Health Data Exchange Help Improve Quality of Medical Care (iHealthBeat, 02/25/10)
Five Healthcare IT Decisions to Avoid (Healthcare IT News, 02/04/10)
2. Buying non-compliant software – Your entire organization is expecting the software to meet national standards or federal mandates, but the vendor fails to develop their product in accordance to these guidelines. In the case of stimulus incentives, being disqualified becomes a possibility. Moreover, penalties for not adopting could be enforced.
(ProtoHIT is developed to NIH standards)
Scaled-Back Healthcare Reform: Is It Possible, Would It Work?(01/22/10, panel discussion at NPR)
A History of Our Healthcare Future, by John Halamka, MD, CIO, CareGroup Health System, Harvard Medical School (Healthcare IT News, 01/20/10). Three predictions:
- Clinicians will become healthcare coordinators, working in partnership with patients to manage wellness using a shared lifetime electronic health record.
- Patients will undergo fewer tests and take fewer medications because redundant and inappropriate care will be reduced. Healthcare value will improve – higher quality for less costs, since less care is often the right answer.
- Payers will reimburse providers for quality rather than quantity since electronic health records will document the care given and not given.
Workers comp managed care – predictions for 2010, by Joseph Paduda, Managed Care Matters (blog)
The Checklist Manifesto (The Week, 01/07/10) “Human error might plummet, says surgeon Atul Gawande, if we all embraced a profoundly simple tool.”
Healthcare Reform To Have Major Impact On Workers’ Comp Costs (Insurance Journal, 12/16/09)
Joseph Paduda, principal, Health Strategy Associates, LLC and writer of the blog “Managed Care Matters,” observed that with or without healthcare reform, changes in the medical landscape will have a major impact on workers’ compensation insurers.
Testing, Testing. The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?(New Yorker, 12/14/09)
Health-care costs are strangling our country. Medical care now absorbs eighteen per cent of every dollar we earn. Between 1999 and 2009, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family insurance coverage rose from $5,800 to $13,400, and the average cost per Medicare beneficiary went from $5,500 to $11,900.
Work Related Injuries Underreported (New York Times, 11/16/09)
Study: U.S. Lags Behind Many Other Countries in EHR Use(11/5/09)
Healthcare Might Be Ripe For Cloud Computing (ihealthbeat, 10/27/09)
HHS Publishes Interim Final HIPAA Rule (10/30/09)
Integrate Workers Comp To Cut Health Costs: Study (10/26/09)
“Only 12% to 14% of health insurance premiums go toward administration and profit,” researchers said in the report.
“Workers compensation turns this ratio on its head, spending the majority (50-60%) of premiums on these same overhead costs,” the researchers found.
Lack of Medical Records Favors Workers Compensation Claim(10/09/09) “An employee is entitled to an “inference” that her injuries are work-related because Xerox Corp. failed to produce medical records from a worksite facility she visited, a New York appellate court has ruled.”
Online Tools Help Payers Gain Insight Into Data (Health IT News, 09/01/09) “Employer groups and payers are increasingly using online tools to control healthcare costs and improve their employee and member health status.”
To Cut Healthcare Costs, Let’s Start With The Secret Prices (US News, 09/15/09)
Workers’ Comp Costs Soar For Self-Employed (San Francisco Business Times 09/03/09)
Where Healthcare costs the most and least (Money Magazine, 06/10/09)
Protohit News
Interview with Bruce Fryer, CEO ProtoHIT, KPCW, November 16, 2009.
How to start a 100% virtual company David Strom’s Web Informant, September 21, 2009
Tech transfer booming at UNM New Mexico Business Weekly, August 7, 2009
ProtoHIT Inc., a medical software company, raised $90,000 in a syndicated deal that included vSpring Capital and three other investors.
ProtoHIT medical software steps toward commercialization at UNM New Mexico Business Weekly, February 27, 2009
A good dose of efficient management allowed Dr. Phillip Wagner to improve treatment for his patients while radically reducing office visits…[Bruce] Fryer [CEO] said ProtoHIT needs less than $1 million to become cash-flow positive because the company is using “cloud computing” through Amazon Web Services. Under cloud computing, Amazon hosts and maintains the system for a fee, allowing ProtoHIT to rapidly roll out and scale up services with no upfront costs.