Feature Articles

I didn't want to write about pharmaceutical companies.  They get enough bad press, and adding to it almost seems like piling on.  If Valeant is the poster company for outrage about drug pricing, it's less because what they are doing is unusual than it is because we suspect they are the norm. Honestly, I wanted to discuss McDonald's turning their Happy Meals boxes into VR headsets --I'm not making that up -- but, gosh darn it, it's almost like the pharmaceutical companies are daring me to talk about them.  So I will.

Read More »

I've previously expressed my concern that Oscar and some of its fellow health insurance start-ups might be more about repackaging than reinventing.  I'm more concerned than ever after Bloomberg reported that Oscar is adopting a new network strategy: moving to "tight, exclusive networks with hospitals."  Oscar CEO Mario Schlosser said: "The bet we made in going deep with a couple of health systems, I love what we’re doing there. We’ve got a very good blueprint now to go into new markets."

Read More »

Next week is HIMSS16! I’m very excited to go to Las Vegas this year and see so many friends and colleagues and am ready to engage in conversations that will help drive the future of our industry. We have a lot of new technology to show at our booth - changes many of you have been asking to see in Health IT. This kind of change is now necessary because Health IT is running in circles. For too long, Health IT vendors have replaced old technology with different outdated technology. As an industry we can’t tolerate this anymore. Read More »

With 35 percent of rural hospitals losing money and almost two-thirds running a negative operating margin, there’s simply no way rural facilities can invest in health IT without help...It’s clear that CMS understands we can’t leave rural hospitals to fend for themselves. But it also seems clear that a lot of hospitals invested in electronic health records (EHRs) they could ill afford to qualify for Meaningful Use funds—dollars that seldom covered implementation costs for solutions that didn’t yield significant cost savings and required additional technical personnel...“The high capital and operating costs associated with health IT, specifically EHRs, have put some hospitals in a difficult position,” wrote Becker’s Hospital CFO in a prescient January 2014 article. “Do they absorb the financial hit now, even if they know they can't afford it? Most organizations are doing so …”

Read More »

...recently, the ONC Interoperability Roadmap, recognizing that the building blocks of universal interoperability could not be so neatly erected, leans on the idea of “coordinated governance” of networks. While these frameworks have paid homage to the concept of nationwide network as a “network of networks”, we have yet to crisply define the stitching needed to form this nationwide network quilt. This issue hasn’t been so pressing up until now because there were relatively few networks – the “last mile” problem was the bigger concern. Network formation is evolving rapidly, however, which has made more pressing the question of what it means to connect networks in a uniform way.

While preparing for, and participating in, the recent FHIR Connectathon 11 held in Orlando, Florida, yet another benefit of FHIR’s implementer-friendly philosophy became apparent to me – the ability to facilitate Test-Driven Development (TDD). TDD has been defined as “a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes an (initially failing) automated test case that defines a desired improvement or new function, then produces the minimum amount of code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards.” Dating back to 2003, TDD is now considered by many developers to represent the state of their art – shining some much-needed light on the darkness might be another way of looking at it!

Read More »