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...

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...

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...