One of the goals of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to provide coordinated care which, in turn, increases quality and efficiency within the healthcare field, and reduces costs. Have you considered the benefits of ACOs from both the patient and provider perspectives?[read more]

Tony Gabbert, Operations Manager at Monash Health

Monash Health in Victoria, Australia, has implemented a vendor-neutral archive (VNA) to store, secure, and access its medical images and other clinical data. Tony Gabbert, operations manager at Monash Health, told us that the facility has many sources of imaging, and that using a VNA provides a better experience for the physicians and the patients.[read more]

Expensive healthcare / shutterstock

Why are healthcare costs in the United States twice that of other countries? Healthcare inflation has been going on for decades, and although its rise has slowed the last few years, the costs of healthcare threaten to consume both the federal and state budgets and are still a leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. The main reason is price.[read more]

Digitally educated patient (source)

Who hasn’t encountered, in their working lives, a patient who comes to a healthcare appointment having done so much outside research that somewhere along the way he or she has stopped being open to new ideas or prescriptions? But are they really resisting, or just mired in copious, conflicting, and sometimes inaccurate information?[read more]

Good / bad health IT

This infographic takes a look at six different instances where examples of good and bad Health IT exist. These areas include finding patients, evaluating test results, entering case information, ordering prescriptions, dealing with dosing, and discharging patients.[read more]

Physician liaison programs often fail at both the practice and the hospital level. Well-intended efforts frequently crash and burn. This resource-wasting demise, in our experience, can be traced directly to one or more of the following “reasons to fail.” Ignore these classic mistakes at your own peril.[read more]

health tech

The past two days, I’ve been in Tempe, Arizona, to participate in an invitation-only conference to launch Project Honeybee. The mission is to expand and accelerate efforts to sustain health through the prevention and early detection of disease. The focus is on clinical application of wearable biosensors.[read more]

patient satisfaction

Addressing community health literacy as a whole is no small task, but taking even small steps forward to increase access to resources and create content for patients that is easy-to-read, actionable and brief is helpful. Redesigning patient satisfaction surveys to follow a similar format will will assure that the questions are understood.[read more]

Should doctors blog?

Blogging is a great way for doctors to connect with their patients and potential patients as well as establish themselves as a leader in their fields. However, blogging for doctors carries its own unique set of potential pitfalls. Here's what to look out for.[read more]

A peek into medicine's future / shutterstock

I can answer this question, at least speculatively, from the perspective of clinical practice and medical technology, where there will be enormous changes to healthcare. Here are examples of what I see from tracking trends in clinical practice and medical technology development.[read more]

checking into a doctors' "lounge"

The success of medicine largely depends on how well it develops, acquires, and uses knowledge. Yet doctors face an exploding base of bio-medical literature increasing in size and complexity. Some tools that expand the find-ability of information are free and can sleuth the stacks for you.[read more]

Obamacare survives (Fresh Conservative / photopin cc)

President Obama just announced that 8 million people signed up for coverage on federal and state health insurance exchanges during the initial open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. But focusing just on the exchanges actually seriously underestimates ObamaCare’s impact.[read more]