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Archives for the ‘healthcare’ Category

The Future: athenahealth and TriZetto.

By Justen Deal • May 9th, 2008 • Category: business, future, healthcare

Sometime in late 2004, I started taking note of this interesting, little (but growing) enterprise out of Massachusetts called athenahealth. I became interested in the company, with its lack of capitalization and spacing, after it got (what I believe was) its first mention on HIStalk. Naturally, Tim couldn’t pass up the opportunity to [...]



AHIP: Harry and Louise are back.

By Justen Deal • Jan 18th, 2008 • Category: healthcare

Fifteen years ago, America had a long discussion about how to implement universal healthcare coverage. The proposal developed by Hillary Clinton, dubbed Hillarycare by its critics, certainly had its weaknesses, but the nuclear weapon that annihilated not only her proposal, but the entire discussion itself — and ensured the topic wouldn’t come up again [...]



Epic: In for a penny, in for a pound?

By Justen Deal • Nov 16th, 2007 • Category: HealthConnect, Kaiser Permanente, healthcare

Call it HealthConnect, Take Two. Only this time, replace Kaiser Permanente with Sutter Health.
Tim, over at HIStalk, was the first to pick up a story by Chris Rauber covering Sutter’s Epic Systems implementation. The guy in charge over at Sutter, Jerry Padavano, wants to be clear: “I’ve learned from Kaiser’s missteps, and we’re [...]



George Halvorson: Killing Kaiser Permanente.

By Justen Deal • Nov 12th, 2007 • Category: Cost of Care, Kaiser Permanente

I posted last week that membership growth at Kaiser Permanente has crumbled for the past three quarters, down 75% so far this year, a seemingly significant fact that was buried six paragraphs down in the quarterly press release. The news only gets worse from there, sadly. While potential new members are staying far, [...]



Rescission: the antithesis of “right.”

By Justen Deal • Oct 24th, 2007 • Category: Cost of Care, Kaiser Permanente

A year ago this week, Kaiser Permanente was called to task for its practice of rescission, the retroactive termination of health insurance coverage. In many cases, coincidentally, Kaiser Permanente and other insurers will initiate a rescission investigation when someone has just been diagnosed with a serious illness, perhaps a serious and expensive illness.
Now that [...]



Override his veto.

By Justen Deal • Oct 3rd, 2007 • Category: America, Uncategorized, healthcare, politics

Update: MoveOn.org is helping organize events across the country to urge Congress to override President Bush’s “reckless veto.”
The gist: President Bush has vetoed an important bill that would have helped expand insurance coverage for uninsured children. The only hope now is for fifteen additional Republicans to vote to support the bill in the House, [...]



I’m not sad for you.

By admin • Jun 25th, 2007 • Category: Kaiser Permanente, healthcare

Michael Moore is ruffling more than a few feathers with SiCKO, his new movie which shines a (camera) spotlight on what’s wrong with healthcare in America. The movie doesn’t even open until Friday, but guess which healthcare organization already has its press release ready to go, saying its “portrayal” in SiCKO “must be addressed.” [...]



We see everything is going wrong.

By admin • Jun 23rd, 2007 • Category: HealthConnect, Kaiser Permanente, healthcare

Marie-Anne Hogarth, with the East Bay Business Times, has what I believe is the first interview with Phil Fasano since he joined Kaiser Permanente back in February. In the first dose of honesty in a while, Fasano admits KP is falling far short on reliability when it comes to HealthConnect:
The first goal, Fasano says, [...]



This mole hill of a mountain.

By admin • Jun 12th, 2007 • Category: Cost of Care, HealthConnect, Kaiser Permanente, healthcare

The New York Times is wondering out loud whether the electronic health “cost savings” emperor has an empty wardrobe:
Saving money can be expensive.
Indeed, the quest to save dollars in the nation’s $2.1 trillion annual health care bill is becoming a lucrative market of its own. Thousands of companies, large and small, are pitching cost-saving ideas [...]



It was a slight miscalculation.

By admin • May 31st, 2007 • Category: Medsphere, healthcare

Kenneth Kizer, chairman and chief executive at Medsphere, resigned last week.
In the manual of public relations tricks, I guess issuing a troubling press release on a Friday must have been deprecated in favor of not issuing one at all.
Tim posted word of the resignation at 6:25 Friday morning, while Modern Healthcare got around to it [...]