Legal

An article posted on ZD Net discusses a new online service that helps patients avoid being “non-adherent”, i.e. to take their meds. The American economy loses $177-300 billion per year because people don’t take their medicine properly.

Sean Teare is president of InnovationRx, a Massachusetts-based unit of a British company which aims both to cut the cost of nagging people to take their meds and improve the rate at which they do.

Will this new service work?

As to their business model, “We’re a subset of disease management. If you don’t improve adherence you can lose the impact of other changes. Health plans are looking for short term ROI, and we can show that.”

Microsoft’s HealthVault hopes to bring EMRs to consumersYou can always tell when a particular industry is getting hot: when big tech players start jockeying for position. Microsoft, AOL, and Google are all announcing different electronic medical records initiatives.

Microsoft has unveiled what it calls HealthVault , a sort of personal filing cabinet for storing important medical information on yourself and your family. It allows the consumer to give access to physicians or hospitals. It also includes HealthVault Search, a health search tool designed to work with the platform. Accessible on the HealthVault Web site, this search engine promises to “intuitively [organize] the most relevant online health content, allowing people to refine searches faster and with more accuracy, and eventually connect them with HealthVault-compatible solutions.”

This latter feature. or dream, to be able to connect to other compatible solutions, is part of the eventual goal of a nationalized electronic health record repository. Is this a new idea? No. It has been tried before with limited success. But now that some big players are jumping into the fray, we may see some momentum.

Still, there are some unanswered questions. HealthVault, for example, does not need to be HIPAA-compliant because patients are granting access to whomever they choose. How this would mesh with true electronic medical records, which must be HIPAA-compliant, remains to be seen. There are also concerns about security - who actually owns the information and what happens if there is a security breach?

With less than 15% of medical practices using true EMR systems, consumers may end up beating doctors to the punch.

If you were wondering how to keep track of people…If an organization has a significant number of employees, it can often be a challenge to keep track of where they all are. Some software systems can help regulate workflow in a medical practice by tracking the work of individual employees, but these require some type of manual input on some level.

In case you were wondering if you could implant RFID (radio frequency identification devices) in human beings, some states are already beginning to legislate the matter. California, as is often the case, is at the leading edge in technology-related legal standards. A bill recently signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger prevents employers from forcing employees to have RFID chips installed as a condition of employment or in return for payment.

And while it doesn’t address the issue of voluntary RFID implantation, it has placed a moratorium on the use of these chips in children for the next three years, presumably until more research on safety and security risks can be adequately addressed.

So, for now, medical practices will have to continue to rely on yelling down hallways or paging people overhead to account for live bodies.

Are non-economic caps starting to make a difference?

An article from the Associated Press reports that, at least in Florida, there was an 8% decrease in malpractice premiums for physicians. Let’s see, double the premiums a couple of times over the last few decades and then take 8% off of that, and you get….Well, at least it’s a start. Incidentally, what the AP got wrong in their story is that the cap was not on lawsuits and lawyers’ contingency fees but just on non-economic damages.Part of the problem in the medical tort reform debate is misinformation on both sides. Many attorneys I know are told by their ‘experts’ that the main culprit is the insurance industry which is gouging doctors. Our carrier is actually a mutual company run by physicians and one of about four insurance carriers that did not leave the State of Florida out of over 20 companies. I guess the stress of making so much money off of physicians was too much for those scoundrels to bear.