Doctor, Do I Need This CT Scan ?

  In a rather frightening statistic, it has been stated that anywhere from  1 in 250  to 1 in 80  patients who undergo  CT scans will develop cancer.  These  are numbers extracted from studies in the U.K and U.S.A.  However these global statistics are almost meaningless for an individual patient, and exemplifies the idea that statistics can be manipulated easily to make a point or gain advantage. For instance Spiral CT scans have resulted in early detection of lung cancer and a 20% reduction in death from lung cancer. Certain CT scans can increase the radiation dose by a factor of 3X or more. Having a CT - or CAT - scan puts patients at far greater risk of developing cancer than previously thought,...

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Mike Leavitt: Health reform’s central flaw

Mike Levitt, the former Head of HHS reflects accurately what Congress has allowed in Obamacare.  Among other observations he notes the following in his commentary in the Salt Lake Tribune. It puts more power than is prudent in the hands of one person, and it is not an answer to our national health-care crisis. Set Up to Fail…..Just say no,  Katherine. Mr. President, I am performing a “tooth level surveillance’ as instructed in Obama-care.  I am sorry to report you are in violation of dental dictates. Shortly after being appointed to the Cabinet in 2003, I sought the advice of  one of my predecessors. He cautioned me to be prudent in exercising the considerable regulatory power Congress had granted these offices, noting:...

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Foreign Perspective on US Health Economics

I write for a financial newsletter on  Mergers and Acquisitions.   The M&A market during the first two months of 2011 has been sizzling. And the world markets have been watching the U.S. closely. Goldman Sachs, fueled by   bail-out bucks has fueled predatory acquisitions by huge IT internet social media concerns of startups and sizeable going concerns. Foreign analysts,SVP Eric Paternoster gave a presentation at the 2010  Infosys Analyst meeting……about the Healthcare Economy in the United States.In health care, hospitals are merging to form large health systems. This movement is occurring  because of realistic fear  of governmental mandates to form ACOs and the necessary capitalization of digital...

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Message in a Bottle

  UV Blockers May save your life, or at least from a scar. News about Laser ID-ing Skin Cancers How to Check for Skin Cancers   New blog follower:  Check out the Blog Friends Roll.- Technorati Tags: melanoma,basal cell,squamous cancer,uv blocker,lasers,self diagnosis...

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Over the Horizon

The very recent success of IBMs Watson Computer signals not only the beginning of advances in computer intelligence but the announcement that IBM is about to  embark on disciplines such as healthcare. The one million dollar prize, which Watson earned playing Jeopardy for IBM, is being donated by IBM to a charity.  Watson beat two of the show’s most successful and celebrated contestants – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter – to win a $1 million grand prize that IBM donated to charity.However, the Watson experiment indicates how truly important artificial intelligence and natural language processing can be for all kinds of business uses, including health care, law, call centers and a lot more. IBM created Watson as part of the company’s...

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Teamwork and the EMR potential

  Numerous experts discuss the importance of teamwork to an enterprise for efficiency and safety. In healthcare this concept is a relatively new one in the clinical setting. EMR has many potentials and/or shortcomings in this regard and it will depend upon design and user interface optimization to reach it’s maximum potential. Bob Wachter presents a scenario and back ground for discussing safety culture in medicine, such as the built in hold for surgeons to verbally perform checklists with other staff, such as sideness of surgery, type of surgery, and other important data with the support staff.  These are all designed to minimize or eliminate ‘never events’ like wound infections, wrong side surgery, wrong organ removal, and administration...

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Who is Reading Your Medical Records?

Technorati Tags: hipaa,security,emr,hie,ehr,encryption,hhs,breaches Privacy and Confidentiality issues are now out the physician’s domain and responsibilty. Not surprisingly FierceHealth IT reports  that security breaches of personal health information is widespread. Although paper charts were cumbersome, they were locked up at one location, not floating around in cyberspace.  I am sure these charts were read by others not authorized to do so, however it was near impossible to document this occurrence. Today we have IT whereby access to medical records can be tracked and the burden for keeping it safe largely now lies with non-medical personel.   Pandora’s box was opened, with the use of EMRs,HIEs and HIPAA has lost the...

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Telecommute Week February 14-18

  This week ask your patients to stay home and tele-complain and have tele-treatment.  How about tele-reimbursement and/or tele-admissions, and don’t forget tele-surgery all you tele-docs. I found this article on Gigaom. Did you know that next week, February 14 through 18, is Telework Week? Companies and individuals are challenged to telecommute 1 or more days next week as a way to increase productivity, save money, reduce environmental impact and help employees achieve a better balance between work and life. I’ve gathered a few data points to help you convince your manager to embrace telecommuting, whether that’s during Telework Week or any other time of the year. In general, the people who telecommute tend to be well educated with...

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Sunday Morning (very early)

Similar to what we read daily in regarding to health care I found this tidbit regarding another unintelligible, inexplicable and mysterious document dated back to the 15th century,  long before Medicare, HMOs, and ACOs We are not unique !!  Someone from a far distant and unknown galaxy comes this story !! Mysterious Ancient Document  Reveals – Nothing ! Technorati Tags: mysterious,ancient,cms,hmo,aco...

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Don Berwick vs Congress

  Don Berwick MD must have been on call last night.  His testimony at the  Senate Ways and Means Committee was a good thing for those wanting to repeal the Health Reform Law. When faced with specific questions regarding the costs of reform, and it’s impact upon availabilty of care providers he failed to deliver answers, stating that was not his area of expertise.  It’s obvious Dr. Berwick never ran his own medical practice.  He seemed more bent on the propaganda and rhetoric of the Obama administration, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.. It unfortunately does confirm that some doctors know bupkas about finances. and not just those in private practice.   He even went so far as to tell the committee that they would like...

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Dr Price Tears into Don Berwick (CMS)

A live web video from the hearing on Health Reform Repeal Legislation. Web Video Live Rep.  Tim Price M.D. You listen, you decide,  but a must view for everyone....

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Google Health What’s Wrong With It

See all those ‘blue letters’  they don’t print. In the hope that someday it might save me or my family some time (or maybe my life)  I have been entering medical data into GH the past year or so. Yesterday my wife has a doctor appointment and I went to health.google.com and logged in. I reviewed the data.  It was easy to read online.  I decided to print it and take it with us to the appointment. As usual when going to the doctor one is rushed, so I clicked on the pdf tab and print and walked off.  As I was running out the door and driving to the doctor I glanced at the print out. Much of it was blank, and'/or unreadable. Now you may ask why. Why? Because Google was intent on making a ‘pretty display’ of basically boring...

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Rocket Science 101

img alt="" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('96a29558-b108-480b-9264-6df34066e91a'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "";" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBTvSzjVaBciXdb49suWwd4DArUNRiMFX9yNYi6kvUzT85FxdfgFwiWG5TWvq3TZ0FogDPj-dJ32OtOOaOuHfnHOsSZmNxV9rqQ0owQEkWQEECBb7DrCf1Nmi-VRSVil8M5XqzBA_jdpc/?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none"> That old saying you don’t have to be a rocket scientist is just not true when it comes to your EMR and the ‘certification stamp’ on it. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine. Each year, just scrape off the old label, and apply the new one…..there will be a new national committee with new rules….. The ‘stamp’ must be approved by a collection...

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Rumblings

  I hope to be publishing my blog more regularly. The past week I had a major malfunction of my computer.  Always the one to make things better by adding dual monitors (for more screen real estate) I managed to corrupt several drivers, then my hard drive. (at least I had a good backup). After recovering the system (and having one full day of Window Updates (150 or thereabouts) I am considering upgrading to Windows 7.   It can’t be any worse than what I went through this past weekend. My blogging platform has been Windows Live Writer. It’s much  faster than posting on the blogger platform, and the bonus was getting all the new plug-ins.  So stay tuned for more blogs from The Health Train Express...

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Holy Cupcakes Batman

“Holy cupcakes Batman”, said Robin the boy wonder. Holy cupcakes is what ran through my mind as I sat through the Superbowl yesterday. It was so bad I couldn't eat my pizza or popcorn (my contribution to the food pyramid)My biased opinion is not the product of Left Coast thinking since a good friend of mine from the Right Coast who actually lives in the Southeast USA came to a similar conclusion. So all you pickup gun-toting Dixie-landers, listen up. The names and location of my friends will not be disclosed so they are protected from the gun-toting pickup truck types who like to shoot deer with their kids as a right of passage. Football is not an example of preventive medicine, health or wellness. The only positive things I see are the conditioning of the gladiators in preparation for...

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The Medical Conspiracy ?

Paul Levy, formerly the CEO of a large hospital writes in today’s The Health Care Blog’ about conspiracy theories  Here are some excerpts for clarity on my comments which are also posted at the original blog post. He mentions excerpts from a writing of George Bernard Shaw, and I am not entirely certain which part of his post is the quote or if the entire article is from Shaw’s “The Doctor’s Dilemma, Preface on Doctors”     George Bernard Shaw (1986-1950), Nobel Prize for Literature (1925-refused),  but accepted it at his wife's behest.  He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), Quotes, to follow “The truth is, there would never be any public...

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Information Explosion

  Health is not the only space being driven by information. It has received the lion’s share of exposure, however we should not forget the rest of the spaces, government, military, financial, industry, and technology. The amount of recorded data multiplies almost exponentially for each industry, much like a nuclear fission reaction., and there is significant fallout. Our ability to understand and incorporate into a useful knowledge base overwhelms our capacity to understand the information to frame it into useful form. The federal government IT efforts, and others have and are continuing to build software to extract and display this deta into images understandable at first glance. Without this the data is useless. The same limitations...

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Health Train Express’ Best for Today

    The California Health Foundation sends a daily eletter ( iHealthBeat)about  topics of interest to medical professionals   There are a number of remarkable items in today’s publication....

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February 3, 2011 8AM Express News

  We are going to be reporting on developments on HIT progress that are important news.  Our sources reveal that HIT in healthcare is making progress. There are differing opinions on the rate of growth depending on which side of the argument you lie.  Most physicians are still skeptical that the huge investment will pay the dividend claimed by vendors, CMS, insurers and the pundits, while some who have adopted EMR in their practices say they would never go back. Well, I think not if I had invested between 50 K and 100K  USD and managed to persist through the adoption process successfully, or not I would be happy unless the EMR was a ‘pig in a poke’,  reduced my income, and consumed more of my time being a  data entry clerk. EMRs are only going to make it easier...

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Are We There Yet?

    Are you waiting for Health Train Express on the train platform? Have a seat and call  911. If you are at all wondering if your doctor will be there next time  you call,  you are operating in reality. In a recent survey sponsored by a well known EMR vendor the results are stunning.  Practice Fusion’s independent consultants found the following: Key findings: * 41 percent of doctors report that their practice is doing worse this year compared to last year. Compared to 26 percent who report their practice doing better and 31 percent report no change. * 59 percent report that new technology has made things easier for their medical practice. * 73 percent report that the computers in...

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