In a continued effort to separate the good from the bad CMS plans to add a five star rating system to its Nursing Home Compare site. They will decide how many stars each nursing home gets by using data from the past three years of inspections, several measures of quality...
Author Archives: anthony
Sex in the Nursing Home
Here is a somewhat heart warming and disturbing article in Slate.com entitled “She was 82. He was 95. They had dementia. They fell in love. And then they started having sex.” It is nicely written by Melinda Henneberger. Stop and read it then come back and comment about what you...
Premerus Misdiagnosis Site
One update regarding my post last week about the above. Thanks to my intrepid friend, patient advocate and better researcher than I, Trish Torrey, turns out that Premerus has a business model based on people using its network of radiologists to read their studies. So what looked like a transparent,...
Misdiagnosis nightmare – check this out.
Premerus, a Nashville based company has launched a Web portal -www.yourmisdiagnosis.com – as a way to help patients and their families address the impact of medical misdiagnosis. The company hopes visitors to the site will post their own experiences as a way of sharing insights about the impact of diagnostic...
Patient Advocates
Here is a good article covering the emerging field of patient advocates, worth the read. A friend and colleague, Trish Torrey is an advocate and expert on this topic at about.com.
You Can Lead a Senior to Water but…..
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Medicare Health Support pilot project three years ago hiring eight private disease management firms to set up voluntary chronic care improvement programs for beneficiaries. At its height 150,000 seniors were enrolled in the program. 68,000 beneficiaries still receive services. By using...
Quality Data – The Public Does Not Believe
Consumers using the Internet trust Web sites providing illness cause and treatment data, but are wary of Web sites providing quality information, according to research presented in an America‘s Health Insurance Plans online seminar. Metavante Healthcare Payment Solutions contracted with Change Sciences Group to conduct the online interactive survey. More...
You Can Lead a Senior to Water butÛ_..
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Medicare Health Support pilot project three years ago hiring eight private disease management firms to set up voluntary chronic care improvement programs for beneficiaries. At its height 150,000 seniors were enrolled in the program. 68,000 beneficiaries still receive services. By using...
Good Marketing or Just Plain Nuts
Alliance Community Hospital in Ohio has publicly done what most marketers think about secretly but never do. They have outrightly asked their community members to share information on the prices and charges that they have encountered as patients at their competitors. And they have offered a bribe, I mean payment,...
Institute of Medicine Study Warns Boomers Better Take Care of Themselves
The Institute of Medicine released a report Monday on the health care outlook for the 78 million baby boomers about to begin turning 65. It was not rosy. In short, there aren’t enough specialists in geriatric medicine; insufficient training is available; the specialists that do exist are underpaid; Medicare fails...