Trusting relationships are the core of medicine. Can telehealth support them?
After the Crash. After an astonishing run during COVID, digital health and tech stocks withered in a broader collapse of NASDAQ companies in early 2022. What do past industry cycles teach us about how important innovations recover from initial challenges and become essential to our lives? How will health tech recover from the crash and what do innovative companies have to do to power through the downturn?
Digital Health: Avoiding a Second TechLash!
Digital Health: How to Avoid a Second TechLash Digital health offerings have dramatically expanded during COVID, catalyzing tens of billions of venture and private equity funding for new ventures. And yet digital health enthusiasts are making many of the same mistakes that proponents of the electronic health record made two decades ago. How can digital health offerings fit into and improve US healthcare, while improving communication, co-ordination of care and patient/consumer safety.
An American Disgrace
An American Disgrace Jeff Goldsmith reviews Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s “Deaths of Despair” for Health Affairs.
Managed Care 3.0: Rise of the Robots
Managed Care 3.0: Rise of the Robots Much is being made of the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. Little did care providers know that it is already affecting their cash flow! Managed Care 3.0 explores how AI assisted robotic process automation is being used by large and little known healthcare revenue cycle vendors to scrub (and reject) medical claims. Care systems are fighting back with their own AI-assisted systems. Read about this rapidly emerging sector and its risks to care providers.
Health Systems Need to Completely Reassess How They Manage Costs
Health systems Need to Completely Reassess How They Manage Costs. In this Harvard Business Review online posting, Jeff Goldsmith says that health care executives frequently tell him that, in response to recent financial pressures, that “they have done all the easy stuff”. This article explores what they will need to do to actually get control over their costs. If they believe they have picked all the “low hanging fruit”, this article argues that “it is time to get a ladder”.
Do Most Hospitals Benefit from Directly Employing Physicians?
Do Hospitals Benefit from Employing Physicians? Over the last decade, hospitals have employed more than a hundred thousand physicians, many formerly in private practice. Recent evidence suggests that each practice generates direct losses of nearly $200 thousand per year, before considering incremental hospital market share gains. How should hospitals think constructively about the complex challenges surrounding physician employment, and create value both for patients and their physicians? This Harvard Business Review article, with Navigant colleagues Alex Hunter and Amy Strauss, frames and answers these questions.
To Combat Physician Burnout and Improve Care, Fix the Electronic Health Record
Fix the EHR! The so-called Electronic Health Record has become a major source of professional dissatisfaction in healthcare. With Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and author of Digital Doctors, Jeff discusses what has gone wrong with the design of this complex tool, and lays out the major changes that need to be made in EHRs for them to achieve their potential in improving both care and the patient experience.
5 Ways U.S. Hospitals Can Handle Financial Losses from Medicare Patients
What to Do About Hospitals’ Medicare Financial Losses. This Harvard Business Review blog posting is a follow up to the October blog, and explores why losses in treating Medicare patients have soared (to more than triple the losses from Medicaid patients!), and how hospitals can work with their clinicians to improve care processes, eliminate needless variation in use of the hospital’s services and reduce those losses.
How U.S. Hospitals and Health Systems Can Reverse Their Sliding Financial Performance
What Hospitals Can Do to Reverse their Sliding Financial Performance. This Harvard Business Review blog posting examine the causes of the sharp deterioration in hospital operating earnings during 2016 and early 2017, and outlines essential strategies managements should pursue to reverse those declines.
Confessions of a Healthcare Super User
Confessions of a SuperUser This posting explores what Jeff Goldsmith learned about the health system he has worked in for over forty years as a patient. It examines his experience of five complex surgical episodes in four different health systems, and how theories of how the health system works match up against the patient experience.