This article on NPR is chiefly about the dilemma that hospital administrators are facing as escalating government reporting requirements are being tied to their Medicare payments. (For my non-US readers, Medicare is the U.S. government medical insurance program for seniors and retirees. It pays a huge portion of hospital’s revenue, and thus, its policies carry [...]
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to return and see my friends in the Netherlands, and I’d like to share some observations from the Lean Thinking in Healthcare Symposium I attended over there. But that conference was on Friday. I arrived in-country on Monday morning at 7:30am. By 10:30 am I was [...]
Lesley Doherty, the Chief Executive at NHS Bolton in the U.K. was recently interviewed by IQPC as a precursor for her being a keynote speaker at a conference IQPC is sponsoring in December (Zurich). In the spirit of full disclosure, IQPC had invited me to participate in a “blogger’s panel discussion” (along with Karen Wilhelm, [...]
This would be funnier if it were not true. The video was apparently produced to dramatize this piece in National Journal Magazine. Then again, the air travel industry should not go unscathed here, so for your amusement, the TSA Theme by the Bar and Grill Singers, a group of Texas attorneys whose works include “The Jury [...]
While the dentist was looking over my x-rays, he saw something he would like checked out by a specialist. He used words like “sometimes they..” and “might be…” when describing the issue he saw. I get a referral. The information on the referral slip is the name of the referring dentist (which I can’t read), [...]
If I had a category for “What are they thinking?” I would probably tag this post with it. Patient has an eye exam that is covered by her health insurance. The doctor’s office bills the insurance company. The insurance company disallows $29.32 in charges because they are above a contractual amount. The insurance company sends [...]
This news piece, America’s Best Hospitals: The 2009-10 Honor Roll, originally got my attention because I hoped someone might be actually be paying attention to the things that make a real difference in our national debate about health care. Unfortunately, it looks like more of the same. This survey looks at things like technical capability [...]
House Dems want to tax the rich for health care – Yahoo! News The health care debate in the USA is increasingly focused on how to pay (meaning who will pay) to operate a dysfunctional system with costs out of control. I fully acknowledge that in government circles, this is about the only thing they [...]