Archive for the ‘Medicare’ tag
Chart of the Day: Technology used by Medicare Beneficiaries
Useful behavioral data to know for clinical researchers with respect to which technologies Medicare Beneficiaries have within their homes. The chart is from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services:
Chart of the Day: Gender mix of Medicare population
Did you know that the proportion of females in the Medicare population grows with age? Interesting chart from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:
Personal health records and clinical trials
Can personal health records (PHRs) revolutionize the clinical trial industry? In our opinion: Yes. We’re interested in what you think, as well.
To foster a discussion to solicit your opinion, find below a primer on PHR and what the public and private sector are doing to promote PHRs.
What are PHRs?
PHR is a patient-controlled document of his or her health information in a format of his or her choice. (A medical health record, by contrast, is patient health information controlled by a physician, healthcare institution or health insurance company.) Information documented in a PHR can be as limited as emergency health information to facilitate emergent care or as broad as all provider visits, diagnostic records, prescriptions, and health insurance information. Storage formats can range from a local computer hard drive, portable hard drive, or internet-based subscription service.
Public sector PHR activity
Medicare (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services), since 2006, has undertaken several pilot programs to encourage the use of PHRs. For more about Medicare pilots, click here. A number of policy recommendations have been made by the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.
Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) has assembled a special PHR Advisory Task Force and created an associated workgroup in order to draft a set of certification criteria for PHRs. The certification criteria, which are scheduled for release by 2010, will place an emphasis on industry privacy safeguards while also addressing security and interoperability issues. For more information, click here.
A number of states have introduced legislation to govern the usage of PHRs. For a survey of state-level legislation, see the National Conference of State Legislatures tracking by clicking here.
Private sector PHR activity
A list of players in the PHRs:
- CapMed.com
- Microsoft HealthVault
- Caregiver Alliance Web Services
- MiVia
- CEND-PHR
- MyGroupHealth (Group Health Cooperative)
- Collaborative Family Health Record
- MyHealtheVet (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)
- Dossia
- MyHIN
- FollowMe
- MyMedicalRecords.com
- Google Health
- Myphr.com
- HealthAtoZ
- Patient Gateway (Partners HealthCare)
- iHealthRecord.com
- PatientSite (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center)
- LifeOnKey
- RecordsForLiving.com
- Med Alert
- e-Healthkey
- Revolution Health Group
- MedCommons
- VitalChart
While not meant to be exhaustive, the list above suggests that policy announcements have encouraged a proliferation of private sector offerings in the PHR space. For a more exhaustive list, visit myPHR. In addition, several non-profit organizations have initiated studies to evaluate standards to optimize interoperability, security and data modification (see Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, PDF).
Opportunity for clinical trials
The “low-handing fruit” for science and clinical research, in our opinion, lies in the intersection of PHRs and these core areas:
- Analysis of diagnostic data for patient identification for clinical trial recruitment
- Self-identification for clinical trial recruitment
- Analysis of historical records for hypothesis creation
Interested in your opinions…
Chart of the Day: Administrative costs of Medicare vs. Private insurance
One argument that has been used in the healthcare debate over the “public option” is that publicly managed healthcare is more efficient (i.e., lower administrative costs, and more dollars go to patient care instead of overhead). This may be true when comparing Medicare to Private insurance on a percentage of total costs. But, since administrative costs are relatively fixed costs, shouldn’t we be looking at the absolute costs rather than as a percentage of total costs?
Since health insurance administrative costs are a relatively “fixed” costs, it’s important to compare administrative costs in Medicare and Private health insurance an absolute basis. The Heritage Foundation provides an illuminating chart (article here):
