Earlier this month, researchers released a study of patient-initiated emails to providers with Northern California Kaiser Permanente (KPNC) in 2011/12 in the JAMC . The study focused on patients with …
Maxwell Health LLC is a rapidly growing company that offers a platform to make it easy and intuitive for employees to manage their employer-sponsored benefits. It is at the intersection of several ma…
Mercy Health – the largest system in Ohio – has recently formed a Clinically Integrated Network (CIN) with Summa Health called Advanced Health Select. CINs allow separately owned provider systems to j…
Systems biology finally gets real: an unexpected use for a diabetes drug
Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) has been the poster child first for a disease with a precise genetic cause (the Philadelphia…
What are annual physicals for?
Annual physicals are costly (~$10 billion annually) and have never been shown to improve outcomes, but people value them. In this dichotomy lies a lot of the inner tensi…
A few problems
Geographic barriers to the entry have long protected providers from best-in-class competition. Provider consolidation – theoretically a logical response to the current operating enviro…
Summary
In this working paper, we develop the following thesis. In the not so distant future (a decade or two), medicine will be largely governed by algorithms -- highly deterministic clinical pathway…
Over eight months between October 2014 and June of this year, Ochsner formalized alliances with five major provider systems in Louisiana. The first wave (with St. Tammany Parish, Terrebonne and Slidel…
Promise for systemic amyloidosis (and beyond?)
Systemic amyloidosis is an uncommon disease in which abnormal cells (typically antibody-producing B cells) produce large amounts of protein that deposit …
Summary
A Portland-based urgent care operator is launching a health plan from scratch
The strategy targets the busy and healthy with the convenience of a retail network providing “store brand care”; …
The emergence of a new approach to drug development in cancer
Cancers are classified by the organ or tissue from which they arise, but as our molecular understanding increases, another level of categ…
In a recent study, Ryan, Shortell, et al analyzed the composition of PCP compensation (broken down into salary, productivity and quality/other components) across practices with ACO contracts vs. those…
Palbociclib – first to target cyclin dependent kinases – breast cancer
As all biology majors know, cyclin dependent kinases are critical elements controlling the machinery of cell proliferation. They…
Interventionalist treatment for stroke:
In the 80s and 90s, treatment of myocardial infraction was greatly advanced by the introduction of systemic clot busting drugs (t-PA and others); further advanc…
Early results of the ACO experiment: directionally right, but impact is still small
In this study, the authors compare metrics for Medicare beneficiaries assigned to the 32 ACOs part of the Pioneer pr…
The rise, fall, and rebirth of the Chinese healthcare system
A fascinating account of the evolution of the Chinese healthcare system which almost seems to be an upside-down picture of the rest of the …
The build-out of the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo branded networks continues apace. Most recently, the Virginia Hospital Center joined the Mayo Clinic Care Network in March and Sequoia Hospital (Dignity…
A promising agent for Crohn’s Disease, a miserable illness
Crohn’s is an inflammatory bowel disease that is notoriously unpredictable; flares can affect any part of the digestive tract and lead to gra…
CMS has issued a “Request for Applications” describing its Next Generation (NG) ACO. The model makes progress on three issues that have generated plenty of analytical handwringing from MedPAC and th…
Ezekiel Emanuel wrote an op-ed in the New York Times last month, which highlighted the low number of new antibiotics that have been brought to market in the past two decades. Antibiotics are a unique …
Our selection from a month with relatively few exciting articles - perhaps this long Boston winter has us all down.
Precious metals and health plan buying:
The implementation of the ACA has placed …
A vaccine for dengue finally nears the market
Dengue is a mosquito transmitted viral infection that is often severe and occasionally fatal, and that has been identified as a growing public health thre…
A few days ago, Cleveland Clinic announced the formation of the Midwest Health Collaborative (“the Collaborative”), a new company jointly managed by six Ohio delivery systems across the state. The co…
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