The venerable University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston will accept patients with traditional Texas Medicaid health insurance, and some patients in Medicaid managed care plans. Memorial Hermann, another large health system in Houston, will accept traditional Medicaid patients and also those in Medicaid managed care plans. Neither institution will accept the Blue Cross Blue Shield HMO silver plan sold on the Affordable Care marketplace, according to NPR , and as clearly outlined on the MD Anderson website . As it turns out, the conservative state of Texas is able to obtain best in the world health care for its poorest and sickest citizens, while the private market representative, Blue Cross Blue Shield in this case, is barring its �customers� from the best and most popular Houston hospitals, including the public system (!), and all the doctors that go with these hospitals. This situation is hardly unique to the Lone Star state. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is mandating t...
Escher - Relativity, 1953 The public comments for the proposed rules for Meaningful Use Stage 2 are closing now. After reading the public submissions of several organizations, I decided not to comment, since what I wanted to say was covered by much better heeled organizations, and I am not convinced that individuals can influence government in any shape or form nowadays. Instead, I thought that this would be a good time to look back at Meaningful Use Stage 1 and see if there are any lessons to be learned, something that CMS did not deem necessary to do before moving up the escalator to Stage 2. This is a bit peculiar considering that only 5% of physicians were able to attain Meaningful Use so far, and according to a new study published in Health Affairs , less than 14% of physicians said that their EHR has all the bells and whistles necessary for Meaningful Use Stage 1. Since Meaningful Use Stage 2 is largely an amplified version of Stage 1, it may be useful to look back and identify ...
Somewhere between the 20th century Bank ATM and the 25th century Tricorder, lays the EMR that we should have today. Somewhere between the government-designed Meaningful Use EMR and the Holographic doctor in Star Trek, there should be a long stretch of disposable trial-and-error cycles of technology, changing and morphing from good to better to magical. For this to happen, we must release the EMR from its balls and chains. We must release the EMR from its life sentence in the salt mines of reimbursement, and understand that EMRs cannot, and will not, and should not, be held responsible for fixing the financial and physical health of the entire nation. In other words, lighten up folks�.. A patient�s medical record contains all sorts of things, most of which diminish in importance as time goes by. Roughly speaking, a medical record contains quantifiable data (numbers), Boolean data (positive/negative), images (sometimes), and lots of plain, and not so plain, English (in the US). The proli...
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