A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

Americans are opting for Botox and cosmetic procedures more than colonoscopies and cancer tests, according to a story in Reuters. This trend makes companies like Allergan, makers of Botox and the Lap-Band for gastric surgery, very happy indeed. Plastics and gastric bypass surgeries are back up to pre-recession levels as of 2Q11. However, for companies and providers in other segments of the health care and surgery value-chain, prospects for bounceback in 2011 aren’t as promising. Various indices on consumers’ health care sentiment — such as the Thomson-Reuters Consumer Healthcare Sentiment Index and the EBRI Health Confidence Survey, show U.S. consumers’ perceptions of their ability to

  About 1.3 million people in the U.S. experience a medication error each year, which are preventable events that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or harm a patient, any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer. Two very common causes of medication errors are illegible handwriting by prescribers and misplaced decimal points on prescription forms. Twenty percent of adverse drug events lead to life-threatening circumstances, according to The Leapfrog Group.  The costs of medication errors has been

Doctors practicing in the U.S. are becoming increasingly conscious of the increasing costs of health care. Most consider themselves cost-conscious, and are considering the impact of their practice patterns — in terms of prescribing medicines, tests, and procedures — on the nation’s health bill. In fact, most physicians feel they have a responsibility to bring down health costs. This perspective on physicians comes from the survey report, The new cost-conscious doctor: Changing America’s healthcare landscape, from Bain & Company, published in March 2011. Bain spoke with over 300 U.S. physicians to assess their perspectives on managing costs, drug and device usage, and

“Can Walmart Make America Eat Healthier?” asks The Week. Walmart, the world’s largest retailer and #1 company on the Fortune 500 list, has come out in favor of bolstering health in the food it sells through its 800+ discount stores, 2,700 supercenters, 158 neighborhood markets, and nearly 600 Sam’s Clubs in the U.S. The Financial Times today reported that the company’s plan won the compliments of First Lady Michelle Obama, who is a proponent of healthy and local foods and was present at Walmart’s announcement. The company’s stock price is up over a dollar today, probably based on this news and

Target, fondly known as “Tar-zhay“ in my home, won the Design of the Decade award from the Industrial Designers Society of America for the innovation called ClearRx — a pill bottle. While a pill bottle might seem to be a commoditized sort of item, this bottle was designed to prevent medication mistakes committed by patients who take maintenance medications for chronic conditions. The National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention (NCCMERP) defines medication errors as preventable events that can cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in hands of patients or providers. The Institute of Medicine estimated that

Medical drug benefits meet doctors and their patients via mobile platforms: that’s the prescription for a retail health care experience with the consumer’s checkbook in mind, brought to you by Walgreens pharmacy and Epocrates, the #1 most widely-used mobile drug information source among U.S. physicians. In this offering, Walgreens will channel its discount formulary information through Epocrates’s mobile application. About 300,000 U.S. physicians use the Epocrates drug database for prescription information. These users will be able to use Epocrates to check a Walgreen PSC member’s formulary profile against the prescription drugs the doctor is considering. At that point-of-prescription, the doctor can have a conversation with

Contrary to popular health economic wisdom, the group purchasing organization (GPO) raises costs for its constituents — hospitals — according to a study by two respected economists, Robert Litan and Hal Singer. Do Group Purchasing Organizations Achieve the Best Prices for Member Hospitals? An Empirical Analysis of Aftermarket Transactions found that hospitals could have saved, on average, 10 percent between 2001 through 2010 when they purchased medical devices aftermarket, when GPOs supposedly negotiated the best price; and, in 2010, the savings for hospitals was as much as 18 percent for purchases. The researchers analyzed 8,100 transactions from the MEMdata database. The authors recommend changing the incentive-payment

Cost-competitiveness is driving overall consumer satisfaction with pharmacies in 2010, 2.5 times the importance that cost had in 2009. But even so, customer service and convenience still trump price in the pharmacy. For brick-and-mortar pharmacies, the key factors driving consumer satisfaction are: Prescription order and pick-up process (convenience) The condition of the store Cost competitiveness Non-pharmacist staff The pharmacist. In 2010, cost competitiveness accounts for 24% of overall satisfaction among brick-and-mortar Rx shoppers; that number was 9% in 2009. The retail pharmacy chains garnering highest satisfaction nationally are the Good Neighbor Pharmacy, Health Mart, and The Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy, all awarded

Two weeks ago, I bought a package containing 100 caplets of Tylenol PM caplets from my grocery store’s pharmacy aisle. I checked the lot number marked on the box against the list on the McNeil consumer healthcare website, and my lot appears to be fine. Today, Avandia, the prescription drug that treats diabetes, hit the headlines of the world’s major newspapers: Avandia Panel Hints At Doubts of Credibility, says the New York Times Avandia Hearings To Reveal True Dangers of Popular Drug, according to FOXNews GlaxoSmithKline Hid Negative Avandia Data: Lawmakers, reads ABC News Glaxo to Pay $460 million in Avandia Settlement, notes Reuters. And there’s also

People responsible for managing the health care industry supply chain have always been concerned about regulations and compliance requirements that can negatively impact their ability to manage the materials, technologies, goods and services they need to fulfill their organizations’ medical missions and businesses. Now “health reform” joins regulation as a pain point in the supply chain. UPS, the logistics and transport company, has surveyed executives from pharma, biotech, medical and surgical device companies, to ascertain their current perspectives on the health care supply chain. The results of this study are in the report, UPS 2010 Pain in the (Supply) Chain

Health care delivered in today’s model can be thought of as a mass market product. There’s not much customization, even though to each of us, our health is extremely personal to us.   Welcome to the emerging era of personalized medicine: “the right treatment for the right person at the right time.” This is just-in-time, customized, measure-twice-cut-once care bespoke for the individual.   Read more about this transformational market in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report, The new science of personalized medicine: Translating the promise into practice.   Personalized medicine includes several segments: Personalized medical care, such as telemedicine, health information technology and disease

What is value in health care? Every year we spend more and seem to get less, John Seng, Founder of Spectrum, told attendees of a webinar on the Spectrum Health Value Study on 12th May 2009. As we consumers spend more of our own money, we’ll be looking for greater value and “health ROI” from our health spending. Measuring value across a population is confounded by the fact that what one person decides to spend on ‘health’ can be different from another’s health spending choices. In other words, our personal health “marketbaskets” for health spending vary from person to person.

For a consumer who’s enrolled in Medicare and takes three brand name prescription drugs on a chronic basis, the average increase in the cost of the medications used to treat those conditions increased by nearly $2,100 between 2002 and 2008. Between 2007 and 2008, the average increase in drug price over 3 therapies was $556. These findings, and other details describing price increases for 211 prescription drugs int he “Medicare Rx market basket,” are found in the AARP’s latest Rx Watchdog Report: Trends in Prices of Prescription Drugs Used by Medicare Beneficiaries. AARP began the series of drug price Watchdog

Paper, Benjamin, Paper. The lowest-hanging fruit opportunity in reforming health care today is paper. Getting rid of it, that is. In their Recommndations to the Obama Administration and 111th Congress, Ingenix says that, “Administrative cost savings are win-win propositions, benefiting all stakeholders.” Health Populi’s Hot Points: As Congress continues to wrestle with what $20 billion can do for electronic medical data in the U.S., addressing administrative waste is in health is an opportunity to mine some found money which won’t require a 10-year wait for an ROI. The point here is to move toward administrative efficiency in parallel with migrating

The buyers of medical devices aren’t very good shoppers: they lack the kind of information about technologies that would help them make value-based purchasing decisions. So says James Robinson in the November/December 2008 issue of Health Affairs in his essay, Value-Based Purchasing for Medical Devices.   This issue is so important because medical technology is the #1 factor driving up health spending in the U.S., according to the Center for Studying Health System Change in their recent report, High and Rising Health Care Costs: Demystifying U.S. Health Care Spending. What are medical devices? they’re the hardware used by surgeons and

  George Washington ate and drank here. Now, there’s a Walmart Supercenter in that spot. There’s an important crossroads in my vicinity where four major highways meet; it’s called King of Prussia, which is the intersection of the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76), the Pennsylvania Turnpike, US 422, and US 202. A new Walmart Supercenter opens at this intersection today. Across-the-street from the new Supercenter are Neiman-Marcus, Bloomingdales, and Nordstrom, along with hundreds of other retail chains in the shopping mecca known as the King of Prussia Mall. So Walmart’s on my mind. Walmart has become a sort of touchstone for me

  Most employees covered by health insurance favor health plans that provide access to and cover alternative medicine services.   Yet only one-half of these employees feel it’s important for a health plan to require employees to eat properly and exercise, and to provide evidence of such healthy behavior. There’s a disconnect in consumers’ minds between actual lifestyle behaviors and understanding how to use health benefits. I’ve talked about health plan literacy in Health Populi before. Guardian’s survey demonstrates a facet of that phenomenon. According to the 2008 Benefits & Behavior: Spotlight on Medical survey from Guardian Life Insurance Company,

A strong FDA is crucial for the health of our country. The benefits of a robust, progressive Agency are enormous; the risks of a debilitated, under-performing organizaiton are incalculable.   These are the findings of the latest critical analysis of the Subcommittee on Science and Technology prepared for the FDA Science Board, FDA Science and Mission at Risk. FDA Commissioner von Eschenbach requested a hard look at the FDA one year ago, and this report is the sobering culmination of that effort. The Subcommittee included leading members of the scientific community familiar with emerging science, the external marketplace, and the