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Promedica tries to take antitrust case to the Supremes

January 8, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

Other expanding hospital chains will be watching  the Ohio/Michigan system ProMedica’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to keep a hospital it acquired several years ago. A lower court had ruled that the purchase broke antitrust laws.

 

The Supreme Court filing follows an April ruling in which a federal appeals court  sided with the Federal Trade Commission’s order to  ProMedica to divest itself of St. Luke’s Hospital in Maumee, Ohio. The judges said the purchase, in reducing competition, would  unfairly raises prices for patients and insurers. Kaiser Health news reported  that  ProMedica  lawyers have argued that the appeals court was flawed in assuming that ”greater market share would lead to price increases. They also have said that selling the community hospital would lead to the hospital’s demise.”
Cambridge Management Group has reported on another important hospital antitrust case, in which a federal appeals court is considering Idaho-based St. Luke’s Health System’s  acquisition of a physician group.

 

More hospitals reject job applicants who smoke

January 8, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , , , ,

 

Freud

Sigmund Freud, M.D., died of oral cancer caused by cigar smoking.

Carmela Coyle,  president and CEO of the Maryland Hospital Association, writes in Hospital Impact about some hospitals in that state that have banned the hiring of tobacco users. As she notes, some other providers in the nation, such as Cleveland Clinic, Baylor Health System and WellSpan, have done the same thing.
They’re on to something, she writes:  “From a public relations perspective, it’s tough to preach smoking cessation to patients and the community when hospital employees, who, in this new world of community partnerships, serve in many ways as hospital representatives, are smokers themselves. More importantly, however, is that the mindset of hospital executives and trustees is changing, as hospitals shift from fee-for-service payment models to those built on a foundation of population-health management. This new zeitgeist is one of abiding responsibility, for every single life in a hospital’s care. Its employees are no exception.”

Common sense and buzz words for sale

January 7, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

Scott Becker, in Becker’s Hospital Review, translates  the ideas of Harvard Business School Prof. Michael Porter and Thomas Lee in looking at how to succeed in healthcare in the next couple of years as including:

* Building a  dominant healthcare system for maximum pricing power.
*  Applying the ”80/20 rule” to most opportunities, talent, revenues and cost areas. The rule basically means mean that 80 percent of your outcomes come from 20 percent of your inputs.
* Testing new areas but doubling down on winners.
*  Embracing ownership of physician practices.

Of course, some of these ideas are recycled banalities — or just sense for sale at very high hourly rates.

 

 

A bid to curb readmissions using real-time home data

January 7, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

 

MedCity News reports that Healthfirst, a not-for-profit health plan with more than a million members in New York, ”is teaming up with eCaring as part of an effort to reduce unnecessary ER visits and hospital readmissions, using real-time patient data generated through home care.”

”Healthfirst members who are dual eligibles for both Medicare and Medicaid and who are enrolled in the its CompleteCare Special Needs Plan will be targeted by New York-based eCaring, which will apply its data analysis and cloud-based monitoring software, by way of tablets.”

 

CEO’s think boards moving too slowly

January 7, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged

The Center for Healthcare Governance has looked at what it sees as the necessary new duties of hospital boards in context  of the current vast changes in healthcare. In a nutshell, the survey said that hospital chief executives did not think that their boards were moving fast enough to keep up with the new demands.

The center says that in addition to the push to emphasize healthcare quality (as measured by outcomes) and fiscal fitness, boards need to learn more about physician-staff alignment and community health (which, of course, includes much more than medicine).

The center’s  2014 National Healthcare Governance Survey was based on information from chief executive officers and board chairs.

The survey found that chairs scored their boards higher than did the CEOs did in evaluating the boards’ pace  in examining new governance models for possible adoption; having frank strategic discussions  to understand what change in their organizations meant for new strategies; and  developing  strategies for transformational change.

 

 

For-profit chains looking to bright 2015

January 7, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

 

sunrise2

 

Beth Kutscher, writing in Modern Healthcare, looks at why for-profit hospital chains have  bright financial prospects for 2015.

She cites the for-profits’ talents for cutting costs and new marketing initiatives to drum up patient volume.

But nonprofit-hospital chains continue to sputter.

 

The decades-old ‘looming’ primary-care shortage

January 7, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , ,

lube

Margalit Gur-Arie  ruminates in HIT Consultant about whether there really is a primary-care crisis and why it has ”somehow failed to progress beyond the looming stage” for decades.

She writes:

“Our constant inability to address this shortage is also immutable, and it has been so for all the decades we could have used to train more primary care doctors.

“Whether by design or by happenstance, we are now working hard to reduce demand, and perceived need, for actual doctors in primary care, and at the same time, we are working equally hard, if not harder, to increase the soothing volume of cheap and inconsequential services which are considered part of primary care.”

Along the way, she also returns to the old, half-joking, half-serious comparison of primary care and Jiffy Lube.

Value of transparency in physician payments

January 7, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized

edison

Thomas Edison with his searchlight cart.

 

Here’s a discussion in JAMA of the value of transparency in physician payments.

Patient choice and equity in Sweden

January 6, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged ,

Flag_of_Sweden.svg

This article in The New England Journal of Medicine looks at patient choice and equity in Sweden, where there’s universal healthcare but the decision-making  is highly decentralized, with power given to county councils that ”own and operate almost all hospitals and a majority of primary care facilities.”

P0licies change with the varying preferences of center-right and center-left governments about such matters as pharmacy privatization, but a consensus remains that  high-quality healthcare should be available to all.

 

 

 

 

 

Mickey Mouse, M.D.

January 6, 2015by Robert Whitcomb in Uncategorized tagged , ,

(Video included in link.)

Lisa Suennen  writes in MedCity News:

”I expect we are going to see a lot more collaborations between healthcare and consumer products companies like unlikely alliances {one between Disney and Eli Lilly} that go at the core of two of the most serious healthcare challenges: health literacy and behavior change.

”If we could ‘fix’ those two problems, I suspect that we could cut the costs of the healthcare system by at least a third by eliminating many of the medical errors, treatment compliance problems borne of lack of understanding and cultural medical miscues.”

”Healthcare companies had better co-opt those consumer brand companies into helping them communicate with consumers or they may just end up working for them.”

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