Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance.
If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow
(via bijan)
I experienced this first-hand while still in the US and running a small business. And now, as I’ve started my own business in Canada, though there are additional out-of-pocket expenses for some non-urgent health care, I don’t live with the fear that an accident or other unforeseen event could ruin me financially. Further, I have very accessible and cost-effective options for self-insuring, should I choose.
The negative effect this problem has not only on innovation in the US but on American society’s sense of self-determination and well-being has received far too little attention in the debate over health care reform.
Source: bijan
Open Mobile Health Exchange
OMHE was created for the greater good and in the interest of improving public health. Specifically, OMHE can increase electronic communication between people & physicians, OMHE promotes behavior change & disease prevention. OMHE has no royalties, no fees, and no groups to join to access the format, hence OMHE can lower health care costs and promote interoperability.
More grass-roots initiative to build a better system. Awesome.
My recent experience of a family member going through the US health care system reinforced for me the immense need for dramatically simpler exchange of information among health care institutions and the professionals within them. My father’s “chart” was a three-ringer binder of over two-hundred pages. Capable, well-meaning physicians and nurses were reduced to Post-It notes and color-coded stickers affixed to pages in the binder as a means of communicating among themselves. Clearly, this is broken.
Open standards unencumbered by byzantine licensing terms and proprietary technology that can be readily adopted and used by a myriad of devices, present and future, are critical to rebuilding the industry of health care. I applaud Stowe Boyd and the countless others hard at work on building what’s next.
Source: microsyntax.org
By the way, the youngest medical students were born in 1988. They’ll soon be doctors thrust into the most backwards thing they could imagine. Paper, DOS, communication silos… that’s such a different world than what they’ve always known.
Source: chimpandsee
The Future of Health Care Is Social
Jennifer Kilian and Barbara Pantuso, Fast Company:
In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog’s ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies.
There’s a long road ahead to arrive at the future envisioned in this article, but it serves to illustrate how health care could evolve, given the right motivation, enabling technology and — most of all — will.
Of course, this kind of change will develop from the bottom up, in fits and starts, rather than by sweeping policy change or sheer political will. To that end, I’m encouraged by startups like Hello Health and collectives such as Health 2.0 Accelerator. They’re shaking things up, and we can’t have enough of that.
Source: Fast Company
Ontario's EHealth operation bled $1B
Even in a “socialist” healthcare system like Canada’s where they have the authority and freedom to command, they have failed to implement electronic health records from the top down.
I think this mostly stems from the level of waste and fraud that happens in government, but also has much to do with the fact that healthcare IT simply sucks. It’s built by people who don’t understand simplicity nor can they imagine anything other than Windows 95. It’s a shame…
Britain has the same problem. They’d like to establish a national Health IT platform to connect hospitals and doctor practices but they simply can’t politically do it.
Hence the problem with the top down approach.
Meanwhile, 300 million people are now on Facebook. It grew organically from the bottom up because it was useful, easy to use, fun, and free.
Granted, the comparison between bootstrapping a social media site and retrofitting a sprawling, antiquated legacy system may be strained, but the point is still spot-on. A business-as-usual attitude combined with a fundamental ignorance of (and even disdain toward) modern technology and user experience spells failure in any endeavor of this scale.
Source: jayparkinsonmd
