A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

“Internet provides public with health care information that they value and trust and which often stimulates discussion with their doctors,” concludes the latest Harris Poll into cyberchondria, a term that the organization began using in 2002. But Harris Poll’s survey yields a different conclusion for me that I think is a sign of the times: the proportion of health info seekers sharing information with physicians is declining. Take a look at the graph that I constructed from Harris’s data asking the question, “In the past year, have you ever discussed with your doctor the information you found online?” The propotion

Middle-class Americans – those with incomes from $44,000 to $88,000 — face mounting out-of-pocket costs that are eroding household disposable income available for food, shelter, and energy line items.While most of the uninsured are from lower-income families, 11 million of the uninsured live in middle class working families. Most of the growth of the uninsured between 2004 and 2007 — 70% — is in the middle class. The chart tells the tale: the gap between health premium increases and workers’ wages continues to widen, making health insurance unaffordable for more working families. Health Care and the Middle Class: More Costs

How to “widen the front door to health care?” asks PricewaterhouseCoopers in a report on alternatives to universal coverage.PwC describes the crisis of U.S. health care as having “jammed access.” Their multi-pronged solution includes getting efficient, innovating with new care models, aligning incentives, and greater teamwork among providers.PwC points to the emergency department as the most jammed entry point in the U.S. health system, noting that health citizens having trouble accessing providers – primary care, specialists and mental health providers alike.But this isn’t just a supply-side problem: it’s also about patient engagement before people get sick, as the chart above

Notwithstanding a weak economy and global competitive pressures on U.S. business, American employers prefer a status quo scenario with a complement of wellness, chronic care management and evidence-based care combined with greater consumer-direction in the form of tax credits to buy private health insurance.Aon Consulting surveyed 1,100 employers in June 2009 and found that 93% of employer benefits managers favor continuing with an employer-based health care system. At the same time, 81% reject a Canadian-style national health plan replacing the current system. And two-thirds of employers oppose an employer mandate.According to Aon Consulting’s Health Care Reform Survey Report, the top

53.1% of Americans believe that health care is a human right, according to a poll from Zogby International done in June 2009.This was one of a very long list of questions Zogby asked Americans during the week of 6/18 through 6/22/09. I’ve waded through 242 pages of a PDF file available from Zogby describing every kind of permutation of feeling among Americans and health reform. Zogby explored how Americans view employer mandates for health insurance, tax proposals for levying a tax on households earning $250K and over, capping prescription drug prices, cutting costs for home care, among many other tactics.Of

A snapshot of children’s health in America would reveal what all snapshots do: positive and negative spaces.On the positive side of the kids’ health ledger, the percent of children covered by health insurance increased from 87% in 2007 to 89% in 2008. Furthermore, the number of kids receiving recommended vaccines increased since 2002. And, heavy drinking among kids is down. On the downside, environmental hazards are increasingly compromising kids’ health. First, the proportion of children living in counties in which one or more air pollutants were above allowable levels has grown. Second, housing problems have dramatically grown: in 2007, 43%

Notwithstanding the promise of nearly $20 billion in stimulus funding to support the adoption of electronic health records, hospitals are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to laying out capital for HIT investments. Based on the latest Most Wired Hospitals survey, even the Most Wired among American hospitals have had to suspend and/or cut back planned HIT projects. Where they can calculate an ROI, hospitals are focusing on projects with higher rates of return. As I opined in my write-up for iHealthBeat on the 2009 HIMSS conference, Connectedness, Communities, Capital: Putting HITECH in Context, this year,

We’re #1! is a cheer usually reserved for a point of pride: for a class valedictorian, perhaps, or a winning ball team. But in the game of health economics, being #1 isn’t something to be proud of when the investment doesn’t net out to a reasonable return.   The 2009 OECD Health Data set is out, and this year’s top line message doesn’t differ much from last year’s: the US spends a whole lot more money on health care, and gets a whole lot less in terms of life expectancy, infant morbidity, and epidemic obesity rates which inevitably lead to

Four in 10 Americans say they’ve become more conservative in the past 2 years. By a factor of 2:1, more Americans have turned more conservative versus more liberal. The shift for members of all three political parties has been to the right.     This right-shift finding comes from the Gallup Poll of June 14-17, 2009, on annual trends in Americans’ political ideology.   As of June 2009, 40% of Americans call themselves conservative compared to 37% in 2008. This is the highest level of self-described conservativism among Americans since 2004.   Why might this mean for health reform in 2009?

There’s another, complementary track to take to reform American health care that will streamline workflow, cut down on paperwork and save money: administrative simplification. While not a sexy phrase, it’s a very attractive option that will help to contain costs. The UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform & Modernization (UHC), part of UnitedHealth Group, issued its report into this topic, Health Care Cost Containment – How Technology Can Cut Red Tape and Simplify Health Care Administration. UHC found $332 billion in medical cost savings through 12 proposals that group into the following themes:1. For patients, go electronic: use automated cards for