By KENT BOTTLES, MD I am frankly surprised by the number of comments, emails, and telephone calls I have received about my doctor report card blog post. Some were charged with emotion and even anger. The number and tone of...

By MICHAEL MILLENSON The humble tonsillectomy has been at the center of controversies over practice variation, inappropriate surgery and avoidable harm for decades; indeed, well before the terms to describe those problems were formally articulated. Now, thanks to the recently...

By Bianca Grogan Cliquez pour la vidéo en français

By DAVID C. KIBBE & BRIAN KLEPPER Finally, we have a Final Rule on the Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive programs. The rules and criteria are simpler and more flexible, and the measures easier to compute. But they are still...

By PAUL LEVY The talk around the country among health insurance companies is that their insurance business is dying. What is happening? First, the consolidations in other industries, resulting in large, multistate corporations, already mean that many companies self insure...

By Matthew Holt Next week there’s post-Labor day health care fun in San Diego. The 2nd mHealth Networking Conference is Sept 8-9 and Healthcamp San Diego is the day before (Sept 6). Both are run by good health care friends—Peter...

By DAVID DRANOVE Over the next few years, the U.S. healthcare system will be in the hands of academics from Cambridge, Massachusetts. New CMS Czar Donald Berwick was a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. Joe Newhouse, who has...

By ROB LAMBERTS I walk into the exam room and the patient looks up at me with a surprised expression. ”Wow! I didn’t expect to see you so quickly!” I smile and turn around to walk out of the door,...

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE By now almost everybody that has any remote interest in Health Care is aware of the much publicized incentives made available to health care providers for the adoption and meaningful use of certified EHR technology. The most...

By JOHN HALAMKA As a followup to the HIMSS Webinar I gave last week, here's an FAQ in the spirit of last month's Meaningful Use and Standards Rule FAQ. 1. The Emergency Department is mentioned in 9 Core Measures and...

By Bianca Grogan Cliquez sur elle pour la vidéo en français Etienne Caniard of the French National Authority for Health spoke on the French governement's approach to Health 2.0 technologies.

By JOHN GOODMAN Have you ever seen a fair, unbiased, evenhanded explanation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? Have you ever seen anything that even appeared to be objective? I haven’t. So to fill the gap, my colleagues...

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON A recent contributor to this blog wondered about the correctness of “health care” versus “healthcare.” I’d like to answer that question by channeling my inner William Safire (the late, great New York Times language maven). If...

By Bianca Grogan Cliquez pour la vidéo en français The Danish government's Morten Petersen discusses Denmark's National e-Health Portal at the Health 2.0 Europe Conference.

By PAUL LEVY Here is a statement* that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., as dean of Harvard Medical School, gave in an introductory lecture to the medical class on November 6, 1861: Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few...

By DENNIS GRACE On March 28, 1979 the Three-Mile Island Unit-2 nuclear power plant experienced a feed system failure which prevented the steam generators from removing heat from the plant. The reactor automatically shutdown but, without the feed system to...

By BOB WACHTER, MD Well, it happened again. Last Thursday evening, I was somewhere over Saskatchewan, returning from a lovely Mediterranean cruise, in that uncomfortable semi-conscious state that passes for sleep when you’re flying coach, when the airplane’s PA system...