For Outsiders, Opening Doors to Health Care August 20, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in Education, Health Care, Obama.Tags: Education, Health Care, John Hopkins, Masters, Obama
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August 20, 2009
Health care may be a costly drag on the economy, but it’s still a great place to find a job.
Midcareer managers and other workers have been migrating to health care jobs for years, of course. Now, with the recession, the lure is even stronger. Hospitals, which employ more than four million people, added 135,000 jobs last year and 19,400 more in the first half of 2009, even as millions of American workers wound up unemployed.
“The demand for talented leaders in health care is only going to go up,” predicted Jane Groves, a senior vice president at Integrated Healthcare Strategies, an executive search and consulting firm in Kansas City, Mo. “All that demand can’t and shouldn’t be filled by people already working in health care.”
Frank Pinkowsky worked as a manager at DuPont for 24 years before taking a position as senior vice president for human resources at the Guthrie Clinic in Sayre, Pa. “Don’t underestimate the value of what you learned working for someone else,” he advised.
Colin Ward, a 37-year-old Baltimore hospital executive, also successfully switched careers, leaving ESPN after eight years of producing sports broadcasts. “I felt like I wanted to be contributing in some other way,” he said.
After 11 months of graduate classes in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a year as a paid apprentice at a Baltimore hospital, he had a master’s degree in health science and management.
Mr. Ward stayed at the hospital, Lifebridge Health, for three more years and in 2007 moved to his current post at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Md., as director of corporate strategy. Still a big sports fan, he produces Ravens football games for WBAL radio on weekends.
The Hopkins school, which also offers a three-year master’s of public health degree, is the largest of dozens of accredited graduate and undergraduate programs in hospital management. Many managers with experience in fields like human resources, finance and marketing find a welcome in health care, with a little studying up. Online courses, books, journals and professional magazines provide material.
The American College of Healthcare Executives, based in Chicago, offers several online pages of career tips, including a two-year-old salary summary at www.ache.org. The Association of University Programs in Health Administration also lists contact information for many schools at www.aupha.org.
“We just recently recruited a vice president for human resources from the supermarket industry,” said Mike A. Helm, a senior executive at Sutter Health, a hospital chain with 45,000 employees in Northern California. Sutter hires 20 to 30 executives a year.
Health care does, of course, have its own jargon and a host of complex challenges. Managers have to know how to deal with doctors, nurses and professional groups, as well as with regulators.
“There are tons and tons of regulations, and the burden is growing,” said Dr. Steven A. Wartman, president of the Association of Academic Health Centers, a nonprofit group whose members are both research and health sciences universities that include hospitals.
The Obama administration’s $19 billion 10-year campaign to promote electronic medical records opens another huge opportunity, said Dr. Blackford Middleton, a technology research expert at Partners Healthcare in Boston. An estimated 40,000 to 160,000 additional health information professionals could be needed, he said.
Dr. Middleton is helping to develop an executive education course at the nonprofit American Medical Informatics Association and a certificate course at the Harvard School of Public Health. online, and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health sponsors some informatics fellowships.
The industry trade association, known as Himss for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, offers an array of online courses that can help technology workers move into health care. Last month, Himss established its eLearning Academy, which, it says, “offers round-the-clock, on-demand access,” allowing students to work at their own pace on subjects like clinician-focused use of information technology, I.T. customer service to the health care user, and health care I.T. strategic planning.
James Platts, 30, chose a more formal academic setting for his training in health care management and completed the joint master’s program in business and public health at the University of California, Berkeley. He now works on health-related projects in the San Francisco office of the Boston Consulting Group.
He came to Berkeley in 2006 from the White House, where he was a junior-level staff member at the National Economic Council for two years. A Harvard graduate in economics, he also put in two years at Nasdaq, studying financial and economic data.
“I thought it would be fun and interesting from a health care perspective to live in California for a few years,” Mr. Platts said, referring to California’s large-scale health care issues and solutions.
Graduates of the Berkeley program are hired at an “average salary somewhat over $100,000,” said Kristi Raube, director of the joint health management program there. Tuition has tripled since 2007, to $35,893 for California residents and $45,093 for out-of-state students pursuing the joint master’s degree.
“Of course, nobody knows what will happen with health reform,” Dr. Wartman noted. One possibility could be pressure to cut costs by freezing hiring and squeezing out management jobs at hospitals and health insurers.
But, he said, “there is a very strong push to cover more people, with a lot of implications for growth in the health care work force.” Other drivers of growth, Dr. Wartman said, include “the continued march of science and technology, as well as uninvited developments such as new diseases.”
Visa going direct into health payments market March 14, 2009
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in Insurance, VISA.Tags: Health Care
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March 13th, 2009
Visa announced a deal with Preferred Health Technology of Carrollton to push PHT’s A-Claim payments system to insurers and hospitals, based on the Visa brand.
A-Claim offers insurers an interface that checks eligibility and automatically calculates payments based on the patient’s plan.
This does not mean patients must settle bills with Visa cards, but it could put the Visa logo onto insurance cards and run payments through Visa’s processing system.
The deal is big for both sides. It puts Visa directly into health care payments. It gives PHT a big partner it can use to secure deals with insurers and hospital networks.
Visa emphasized that the system allows hospitals to guarantee payment at the point of care, noting that as many as 50% of all bills go unpaid.
Hopefully this can also eliminate the common hassle of patients getting tiny bills from hospitals for treatments received weeks or months before, after they have been run through the insurance system. The A-Claim solution promises to run those payments through Visa automatically
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Hot Technology That Could Change Health Care December 25, 2008
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in HIT, Health Care, Interoperability, Technology.Tags: Data, Health Care, HIT, Technology
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Entrepreneurs
08.27.08, 7:00 PM ET
Advances in health care run the gamut from mind-boggling medicines to simple Web solutions that, if adopted, could slice huge slabs of fat from a bloated system.
Whatever form innovation takes in the coming years, much of it will spring from start-ups, not pharma and tech giants. “Little companies can work on something that’s not proven and that has a higher risk,” says Brenda Gavin, founding partner of Quaker BioVentures in Philadelphia and former director of GlaxoSmithKlein’s venture fund. If they can find enough funding, entrepreneurs “basically can go for the gold.”
But it’s not just the risk of failure that hampers big companies’ search for game-changing breakthroughs. It’s the constant demand to generate revenue in the here and now to cover all the overhead and hit aggressive growth targets.
In Pictures: Seven Technologies That Could Change Health Care
“Small companies are much more nimble, so they can react quickly,” says Jack Lasersohn, a partner in the Vertical Group, a Summit, N.J., venture capital fund that specializes in medical technology and biotechnology. “You take an idea, and a few months later you can have a company.”
Another structural issue: Health care is an extremely splintered industry. Many new areas of research–such as personalized medicine and digital document retrieval–don’t fit neatly into established divisions within big companies, ultimately thwarting capital investment.
“Too many investors have failed to understand what health care is as an industry,” says Ralph Sabin, a managing director at Pacific Venture Group in San Diego. “[It] isn’t like financial services or manufacturing. It’s an area dominated by nurses, physicians, hospitals and insurance companies and all kinds of different constituencies.”
All of that spells huge opportunities for tech-savvy start-ups–and new hope for sick patients in need of better, less expensive care.
Philadelphia-based Hx Technologies wants to unlock the power of computer networks (a very ’90s concept) and suck costs out of the system by making it easier to transport diagnostic images like CT scans. Amazingly, shuttling these images to doctors for second and third opinions is still done the old-fashioned way–by hand. That can lead to duplicative and potentially dangerous testing. (Hence President George Bush’s mandate that a majority of Americans have electronic health records by 2014.)
Launched in 2000, Hx Technologies estimates that it can eliminate extra tests–and save the U.S. medical system $5 billion to $6 billion a year–by storing medical images so they can be accessed in encrypted form over the Internet. Hx collects setup fees and monthly rent from insurance companies to use the system; doctors and hospitals use it for fee. Tommy Thompson, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, sits on the board.
The challenge: For this technology to truly take off, Hx will have to blanket the entire hospital system–and that may take a bit more than the $5 million it’s managed to raise thus far from investors including the National Institutes of Health, RK Ventures and Next Stage Capital.
Nurses don’t need to schlep bandages and food–robots can do it better and cheaper, figures Aethon, a Pittsburgh-based developer of mobile robots that use radio frequency identification technology to track and fetch medical supplies. Founded in 2002, the company has raised about $22 million from the likes of Draper Triangle Ventures and Pacific Venture Group.
Aethon’s robots, which it leases for between $1,500 and $2,000 a month, now zip throughout the hallways and supply closets of 100 hospitals in the U.S. Among them: “Tug,” a self-navigating, battery-powered bot the size of a small suitcase that attaches directly to hospital carts and can carry up to 800 pounds. Tug can pick up, sort and deliver medical supplies and meals and run blood samples to labs; he can even ride elevators and open doors.
If you think that stuff is straight out of Star Trek, how about “growing” new organs from the very patients that need them? Launched in 2004, Tengion, based in East Norriton, Pa., aims to do just that.
The process: A doctor takes a tissue sample from a diseased organ and sends it to Tengion’s facility. There, the cells responsible for growth of new tissue are reproduced in a biodegradable “scaffold” made in the shape of the diseased portion of the organ. Several weeks later, surgeons implant the new organ/scaffold structure, leaving the patient’s body to absorb the new organ and excrete the scaffold. Unlike those who receive organ transplants, Tengion’s patients, in theory, won’t need to be on a lifetime regimen of anti-rejection medicine.
So far, the company has invented a way of making a “neo-bladder” based on a patient’s own tissue, and has filed for 70 patents covering the entire process. It plans to eventually move into manufacturing other organs and tissues, including kidneys, blood vessels, hearts, livers and nerves.
Tengion has already raised $150 million in total financing from the likes of Bain Capital, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (the consumer giant’s VC arm), Oak Investment Partners and Quaker BioVentures. Not that success is right around the corner–the FDA won’t approve the process until early next decade, says Gary Sender, Tengion’s chief financial officer.
Then there’s the whole push toward truly personalized medicine, which could fundamentally alter the way diseases are diagnosed and treated. Until now, doctors have relied on the law of averages: Clinical drug trials yield data on how many people are helped by a particular treatment; if the success rate is high enough, that treatment gets the nod.
But as the human genome is better understood, it’s becoming apparent that diseases like cancer can be treated in specific ways, based on a patient’s individual genetic code. “Nothing should cause us to expect that one person’s cancer or arthritis or heart disease is like other patients,” says Brook Byers, partner at the Menlo Park, Calif. venture giant Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. “Standardized treatments will shift to personalized and tailored ones with better outcomes and lower costs.” Personalized medicine has been Kleiner Perkins’ primary area of investment for its life sciences division.
Take its bet on fellow Menlo Park resident Pacific Biosciences. The company is working on a machine that doesn’t just identify DNA strands, but can understand, based on a few drops of blood, how the strands are manufactured, so that they can be sequenced (copied) faster–dramatically speeding up the race for a host of powerful cures. Sequencing a person’s entire DNA now takes about about three years; Pacific Biosciences thinks it can cut the time to three hours.
“If you could sequence people’s DNA thousands of times faster, you could make disease research a software problem,” says chief executive Hugh Martin.
Perfecting that process may take a while. Pacific doesn’t expect its $300,000 to $500,000 machines to hit the market before 2013–but white-shoe investors, including Kleiner Perkins, MDV-Mohr Davidow Venture, and, more recently, Intel, have ponied up $178 million to make it happen.
In Pictures: Seven Technologies That Could Change Health Care
Connecting The Medical Dots December 23, 2008
Posted by gonzalezloumiet in Data Integration, HIT, Health Care, Interoperability, Technology.Tags: 2009, Daschle, DOH, Health Care, HSS, Interoperability, Obama, Technology
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Connecting The Medical Dots
By Mike Leavitt
Monday, December 22, 2008; A21
Washington Post
Congress is considering adding money for health information technology to January’s stimulus package. Doing so could spur a critical mass of the nation’s doctors to finally enter the information age, but unless the funds are tied to standards for the interoperability of health IT systems, the expenditure could do more harm than good.
Before lawmakers act, they need to think: If stimulus money supports a proliferation of systems that can’t exchange information, we will only be replacing paper-based silos of medical information with more expensive, computer-based silos that are barely more useful. Critical information will remain trapped in proprietary systems, unable to get to where it’s needed.
Health IT systems produce value when they are interoperable. When they’re not, doctors who invest in electronic health records cannot share information with each other or add lab results to your file or send electronic prescriptions to your pharmacist. They would have to use handwritten prescriptions and paper files in addition to their electronic files.
That’s not the way 21st-century health care should work. Today, specialists on a patient’s team need to use interoperable systems that share medical records, prescription histories, lab results, imaging and clinical notes. System standards are needed to protect privacy and ensure that content — such as patients’ diagnoses, allergies, medications, lab tests and medical directives — is standard for every patient, every time.
We’re already on the road to a system that is universally accessible and secure. Health information experts, with coordination by the Department of Health and Human Services, have been working on foundational health IT standards and have made substantial progress. Congress has approved our request for higher reimbursement rates for Medicare doctors who e-prescribe. The Institute of Medicine has estimated that more than 1.5 million Americans are injured annually by drug errors. E-prescriptions can greatly reduce that number.
We’ve also established an independent, voluntary, private-sector certifying body, the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT). This body provides “gold standard” certification that electronic health records meet existing interoperability standards. Any stimulus money for electronic health records should go only to those with CCHIT certification.
Likewise, “infrastructure” investments should go only toward supporting exchanges of electronic health information that are compliant with nationally recognized standards. Indeed, supporting health information exchange would be an infrastructure investment that would accelerate public-private cooperation in standards harmonization and certification.
It is important that standards be vendor-neutral. Government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers.
Despite the urgent need to move beyond paper records, simply offering up funds in the stimulus package will not get the results we want. Instead, it may set our efforts back. Systems will be isolated; data indecipherable; health-care quality unimproved.
If we’re going to build a 21st-century health infrastructure, we need to do it strategically, continuing the careful work on harmonized standards that will create one nationwide, interoperable system. That’s the only way to make an investment in health IT produce value for providers and patients and improve the quality of health care overall.
The writer is U.S. secretary of health and human services.
