Healthcare Innovations

Ohio Hospital Pays for Info about Competitors' Contracts with Insurers

Alliance Community Hospital in Ohio publishes its prices, but now it wants to show patients how its prices compare with the discounted rates received by insured patients at competing hospitals. Insurers seem to be squirming but not the hospitals, who say they are contractually prohibited from announcing the information but don't care if Alliance collects the information from patients. I wonder if this strategy has as much to do with helping Alliance negotiate with insurers as it does with informing patients.

Akron Beacon Journal (via AHIP Hi-Wire): Patients Can Get $100 to Reveal Hospital Bills, 2008-Apr-15

Alliance Community Hospital wants to pay you $100 or more to find out how much your health insurer paid for care you received at rival hospitals.The hospital announced on Monday that it wants patients from Mercy Medical Center in Canton, Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna or Salem Community Hospital to hand over their bills and corresponding "explanation of benefits. "These EOB statements from insurance companies detail how much medical institutions charge for procedures and treatments, as well as how much insurers and consumers actually end up paying. ... Alliance Community Hospital Chief Executive Stan Jonas said the offer is part of the hospital's attempt to provide consumers with more information about the true cost of medical services.The hospital plans to share the information eventually on a new Web site.

Treating Patients AT LEAST as well as Cars on the Assembly Line

Don't miss this terrific interview with Dr. David Pate, CEO of St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston. He wants all the systems and physical arrangements of the hospital to be perfectly efficient so that physicians, nurses and all the hospital staff are freed to be human with the patient. Car manufacturers want those cars to come off the line in top condition--and that's how Dr. Pate wants you to leave his hospital.

Houston Chronicle: St. Luke's adopts business approach to efficiency, 2008-Apr-15, by Lynn Cook

No hospital in America is really efficient. That's why I brought in a consulting firm that doesn't specialize in health care, but they've all had experience with Toyota's lean system. Their expertise is really in aerospace, energy and technology. I got criticism for that from some of our staff. It's extremely complicated--medicine. But if we stand back and say health care's too complicated, we'll never get any improvements. They have come in with fresh eyes.

Trying to Restructure an Information System

Independent Drug Information Service: RxFacts, the Independent Drug Information Service (iDiS), is an innovative program designed to provide physicians with an evidence-based, non-commercial source of the latest findings about the drugs they prescribe.

The Independent Drug Information Service is sponsored by the PACE Program of the Pennsylvania Department of Aging and has no ties to any pharmaceutical company.  Its clinical content is created by an independent group of physicians and researchers on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.

Foundations Push for Drug Research

The Boston Globe: Drug makers turning to nonprofits for cash, 2008-Apr-7, by Todd Wallack

Overall, disease foundations invested roughly $75 million in the biotech industry last year, up from $7 million in 2000, according to CenterWatch Monthly, an industry publication."It's becoming a significant method of funding," said Robert Coughlin, president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, which is brainstorming ways to help bring more foundations and biotech companies together.

Research Hospitals Hiring Engineers

Houston Chronicle: Auto technology is an unexpected twist on medical care, 2008-Apr-5, by Lynn Cook:

Stephen Wong, an engineer who is not a physician, chairs medical physics efforts at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute. He says see-and-treat procedures for small-scale lung cancer is coming soon thanks to GPS-like technology.

Evaluating Physicians

Houston Chronicle: Standard for rating doctors begins to take shape, 2008-Apr-1, by Lynn Cook:

The "Patient Charter" unveiled Tuesday is an outgrowth of the Consumer-Purchaser Disclosure Project, an initiative by a group of consumer, employer and labor organizations to improve publicly available health care industry performance information. Groups that have signed on include the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the AFL-CIO, AARP and the National Business Coalition on Health. Insurers participating include Cigna, Aetna, United Healthcare and Wellpoint, along with the health insurance industry's lobbying body, America's Health Insurance Plans. "The framework is nailed down. It's the details where it starts to get sticky," said Jonathan Osmundsen, a spokesman for the project. "Doctors, insurers, employers and patients all come at this from different perspectives, but they've agreed they have to generate fair rankings that are easily understood and actually useful." Among the charter's provisions, still subject to fine-tuning:

• Separation of care quality rankings from cost-efficiency measurements.
• Full disclosure by the insurance companies of what methods they use to rate doctors.
• Prior notice to physicians before they are ranked and a dispute process allowing them to challenge results they consider inaccurate.