Hospitals must ask their affiliated physicians how ready they are for ICD-10.
Linda A. Cyr has joined Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) as a senior adviser.
She draws on a diverse background to address healthcare-sector business problems at the intersection of strategy, leadership and entrepreneurship. She brings distinctive expertise in fostering collaboration among networks of leaders to develop and advance complex inter- and intra-organizational agendas.
Linda’s career spans corporate and academic settings. As an independent consultant, she has served senior leaders at such global corporations as Novartis, AB InBev and EY, as well as at startup firms. She teaches physicians in the Masters in Healthcare Management program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and has served as director of Corporate Health Leadership Programs within executive education at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Previously, Linda was a partner at Tapestry Networks, where she created and managed multi-stakeholder networks and working groups of C-suite pharmaceutical executives, government regulators and health-sector payers as well as clinical experts and patient advocates in eight European nations. Before joining Tapestry Networks, Linda was an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School and at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Early in her career, at GTE, Linda managed direct marketing teams, and designed and administered sales compensation plans and a company-wide sales management curriculum. Linda earned Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a B.S. from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.
“Patient engagement is easily one of the hot-button topics in healthcare these days, but physician engagement {one of Cambridge Management Group’s key areas of expertise} may be catching up.
“According to a recent survey by The Advisory Board Company, the latter form of engagement was listed by healthcare CEOs as the biggest opportunity to improve the healthcare system in 2015.”
“Mike Putnam—senior vice president of American Well, a telehealth provider—said he supports FCC’s net neutrality rules, noting his company has seen an increase in provider visits over mobile networks since releasing an app that enables patients to speak with doctors through the video functions on their phones.
“Matthew Douglass, vice president of Practice Fusion, praised the decision, saying ‘Reclassification of [Internet service providers] under Title II ensures that product features, pricing, and functionality are the drivers of innovation and choice in our healthcare technology market, unimpeded by whether a new company can simply afford to reach their customers.'”
“Ryan Radai of the Competitive Enterprise Institute said FCC’s plans to regulate mobile networks will be counterproductive for technologies that rely on high-speed Internet.”
“IT Now Executive Director Joel White described the rules as ‘unprecedented and dangerous.’ He said his organization ‘fears that hampering the Internet economy with heavy handed regulations will slow the development and expansion of new innovative medical technologies that rely on broadband.”‘
California Capitol
The Sacramento Bee reported that Harris ”called the deal the largest ever overseen by the office, and it carries a hefty set of conditions requiring Prime to provide charity care ‘at historical levels’ and reproductive care without ‘restriction or limitation’; to spend $150 million on capital improvements at the newly acquired facilities; to cover the pension obligations of 17,000 active and retired employees; and to remain certified to treat Medi-Cal and Medicare patients for a decade.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that “no single hospital received high marks from all four services—U.S. News & World Report, Consumer Reports, the Leapfrog Group and Healthgrades—and only 10 percent of the 844 hospitals that were rated highly by one service received top marks from another, the study published Monday found.”
”The measures were so divergent that 27 hospitals were simultaneously rated among the nation’s best by one service and among the worst by another.”
Yet we Americans love rankings!
The Freud Museum in London.
This article in The Wall Street Journal reports:
”The shortage of mental-health providers in the U.S. has long been considered a significant problem. But it is becoming more acute as people are encouraged to seek treatment, or find they are able to afford it for the first time as a result of new federal requirements that guarantee mental-health coverage in insurance plans.
”That’s prompting a sea change in attitudes among mental-health advocates, who are starting to look at solutions that are broader than just training more psychiatrists.”
Consider that in ”the 34 studies that assessed understanding of benefits, patients overestimated their potential gain in 22 of them, or 65 percent.”
The two writers go on: ”Why do patients err in assessments of risks and benefits? One reason could be that what they know is driven by the messages they hear. Doctors, direct-to-consumer ads and the media can skew our perceptions. They tend to focus on the benefits, but rarely quantify them. healthcare centers, screening advocacy programs and pharmaceutical ads all push us to talk to our doctors about getting treatment without talking about actual gains.”
Truven’s top 100 hospitals focus on standardization to improve patient outcomes and cut costs.
Truven reported that top performers have shorter average lengths of hospitals stays, fewer complications, lower mortality and readmission rates and higher average operating margins than their peers.
