Skip to main content

Graying America Gets Wired

...healthcare costs get slashed. Who says old folks don't use computers? From Reuters: "Graying America gets wired to cut healthcare costs"
...Marilyn Yeats, 79, is suffering from congestive heart failure and uses a personal healthcare computer, Connect, provided by the health insurer Humana Corp. She calls it My Little Nurse for helping her keep track of her blood pressure, weight, temperature and whether she is taking her medicines on time.
"It rings me up every morning at 10 am, and there I am, on my machine measuring myself, and if I have gained weight, it asks me additional questions. I say it is like having your own nurse come into your house every day." said the Naples, Fla., resident.
If these programs succeed, home technologies could help slash billions of dollars from the nation's $2.6 trillion healthcare bill by keeping elderly people in their homes for longer and out of expensive hospitals and nursing homes.
Again, pay attention to the growing number of ideas (and funding) devoted to the idea that a hospital admission is a process FAILURE somewhere else in the system. Those ideas and all that venture capital are targeted squarely at hospitals' threadbare business model.

It's a trend that can't be stopped (and shouldn't be if we're hoping to avoid national  bankruptcy.) The only question, really, is when we'll stop saying "Old folks don't use computers..." and say instead "Old folks are like the rest of us in using what adds value to their lives."

And if we view them as computer-phobic Luddites, well, shame on us for lacking the vision and innovative drive to deliver value to those who need it most.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor
Post a Comment
Read more

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare
Post a Comment
Read more

My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved
Post a Comment
Read more