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Your health plan is on a Ben Franklin blitz. They want to make you healthy and wise — and, as payment incentives change, themselves wealthy. So get ready for help in living a purpose-driven life…and getting enough sleep.
By MICHAEL MILLENSON Q: Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency included a promise to repeal “Obamacare” in its entirety. If he succeeds in fulfilling that promise, what impact can we expect on American cancer prevention and cancer treatment? A: Donald Trump, emboldened by eliminating ISIS, ending illegal immigration and energizing the economy, will eradicate cancer. Or
What I remember most was how quickly she won over a crowd that had good reason to be suspicious; how fluently she spoke…and, most of all, the standing ovation some 2,000 doctors and their spouses gave her….Let’s hope the hard lessons Hillary Clinton learned in the 1990s-era health reform debacle imprint themselves in her actions as well as in her words.
By MICHAEL MILLENSON Sure, I’ve always wanted to write a clickbait headline that sounds like a promo for the bastard child of Buzzfeed and the Federal Register. But, seriously: you will not believe what Medicare just did about patient engagement in a draft new rule dramatically changing how doctors are paid. And, depending upon the reaction of the patient
By MICHAEL MILLENSON The annual Lown Institute Conference advocates for the “right” kind of patient care, as in “the correct course of action.” But the political meanings of “right” and “left” also echo, sounding like a healthcare version of the recover-lost-glory demands of Donald Trump and the moral crusade of Bernie Sanders. The program for this year’s
If Lown wants to change the “culture” that prompts those [unnecessary CT] scan orders….I suggest finding some moms willing to publicly agree that not treating their child’s “intracranial bleeds and skull fractures” (as the research phrased it) was perfectly fine.
By KIP SULLIVAN In my three-part series on why we know so little about ACOs, I presented three arguments: We have no useful information on what ACOs do for patients; that’s because the definition of “ACO” is not a definition but an expression of hope; and the ACO’s useless definition is due to dysfunctional habits
A quiet effort has been going on for years to persuade hospitals they can make more money preventing patient harm than by allowing it to occur. When the government announced last week that a patient safety partnership with hospitals had saved 87,000 li…
By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON The eminent physicians Martin Samuels and Nortin Hadler have piled onto the patient safety movement, wielding a deft verbal knife alongwith a questionable command of the facts. They are the defenders of the “nobility”off medicine against the algorithm-driven “fellow travelers” of the safety movement. On the one side, apparatchiks; on the
By MICHAEL MILLENSON Among the 200 demos, 60 exhibitors and more than 100 speakers at the annual Health 2.0 conference on digital health, a critical insight for succeeding in this burgeoning market might have gotten lost in the noise. The crucial advice came on separate days from two of the savviest digerati doctors in Silicon Valley. Not coincidentally, both Dr.