My Healthcare Options Penalizes Hospitals and Confuses Consumers

Recently, the Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council unveiled its new website, My Healthcare Options.  While intended to directly support consumers and physicians as a decision-making tool, the site unnecessarily penalizes otherwise good hospitals through inconsistent ratings, by presenting those ratings without context, through...

My Healthcare Options

The long, long, long awaited — and perhaps feared — Massachusetts quality and cost site just launched yesterday, entitled MyHealthcareOptions. Despite a funky stretched out picture on the homepage and a cartoony rating stars that evoke a Mario Brothers outing more than Michelen fine linen, I’ve been having fun poking around the...

WWDD — What Will Tom Daschle Do?

The former Senator Tom Daschle has been picked for the HHS top spot, and there’s been some excellent speculation — I mean, coverage about what Daschle might do once in office.   I think we often miss the forest for the trees when we talk in these grand policy terms.  Sure, the healthcare system is broken.  I think you’d be...

Winding down our travel season…

Despite travelling extensively, it was a real pleasure to speak at CHPRMS last week.  We had a great session on the changing nature of trust and how social media networks are resetting consumer expectations.  It was a fun time and a great crowd of about 100 people who remained engaged (and awake!) for an hour after lunch. Sometimes...

The Impact on the Global Financial Crisis, Part II

MedTouch Webinar: The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Healthcare, Part II from MedTouch on Vimeo. The news about the financial sector meltdown is everywhere, but how will it impact healthcare? In this second part of a special webinar, Paul Griffiths, the CEO of MedTouch, will walk through how the sub-prime crisis led into Wall St....

Physician Shortages: 3 Big Reasons It’s Getting Harder to Find Doctors… And the Adverse Impacts to Patient Care

We’ve done a fair amount of research this year on the impact of the physician shortage and how it will hamstring the marketing, planning, and delivery of healthcare services in the future. The silent killer is patient access.   The less chance a patient has of being seen quickly, the worse off he or she will be.  Having an adequate supply...

Why Even Google Can’t Fix Healthcare

Of my last post about open source food, Jeff Jarvis commented: I wasn’t suggesting that the kitchen should be turned over. I’m exploring the ideas of openness even in restaurants. For example, I’d like to know which dishes get ordered more so I can use that in my decision. Or perhaps diners can suggest improvements in recipes. And so...

Pretty hospitals make for healthier patients

Here’s a no-brainer from the Atlantic: dingy hospitals rooms have a negative impact on patient care. Over the past decade, most public places have gotten noticeably better looking. We’ve gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If...

McKinsey Quarterly – Hospital Patients Want Convenience and Amenities Not Gamma Knives

From our sister blog, adamcontent.com, is this post about what consumers actually want.  (Hint: It’s not 64-ct...

Forbes asks “How Safe Are America’s Hospitals?”

Forbes magazine’s recent issue has a cover with a patient escaping from an ER, wearing only a paper johnny, and the text “Stop That Patient!  Big, risky hospitals don’t want you going to small rivals — where you could have safer, better surgery.”  You can read the article, entitled “Bad Medicine“, on...