With HIMSS17 around the corner, I’ve been thinking about advances in technology and data and the history of silos and systems in healthcare delivery. Optimizing a part of a complex […]

U.S. pharmacists dispensed 4.4 billion prescriptions in 2015. The total cost was $310 billion. This represents 10 percent of the national healthcare bill. Drug costs are increasing and Americans are […]

Everyone, except for the measurement industry, seems to agree that we have too many metrics1 for measuring performance. An increasing number of individuals and organizations are also saying that the […]

The Missouri Hospital Association’s exploration of the impact of poverty on readmission rates leads them to suggest, “Before Penalizing Hospitals, Account for the Social Determinants of Health.”[1] Here’s an example: […]

The premier medical informatics event of the year, the AMIA 2016 Annual Symposium, had many excellent talks that caught my interest. The one that myself and the audience liked most, […]

I have to give Sir Isaac Newton and his Third Law of Motion a nod: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Does this law apply to […]

If you are interested in improving population health outcomes and by so doing reduce the trajectory of cost increases, it is useful to reflect on the foundations of high performing […]

Let’s assume you’re about to sign a contract to manage a population of several thousand. The goal of the contract is to improve care delivery, improve outcomes and reduce the […]

Return on investment (ROI) is driven in part by our payment decisions, and many of our current choices stack the deck against the possibility of achieving ROI through population health […]

Predicting the behavior of human beings is hard – it is hard enough to figure out how to predict the behavior of our loved ones, let alone patients with whom […]

Improving the rate of mammography or colorectal cancer screening for appropriate individuals is a good thing. I suspect that my experience in practice was similar to others: Our group would […]

Health status can be defined succinctly as, “the range of manifestation of disease in a given patient including symptoms, functional limitation, and quality of life, in which quality of life […]