By Casey Quinlan. It’s not easy hearing your name and [insert dread diagnosis here]. I know this only too well after having to find the funny in my own journey through cancer. Cancer is, however, most often a diagnosis that you fight to a defined end. What’s it like to find the funny in a chronic condition like multiple sclerosis?

I have a number of friends who are battling MS, one of whom, Amy Gurowitz, shared a link on Facebook the other day to Jim Sweeney’s online empire of improv humor and chronic disease. Jim’s MS journey started with vision problems in 1985, he was officially diagnosed in 1990, and has been dealing with the disease – finding the funny most of the time – ever since.

Jim’s body of work includes decades of live improv, his one-man show “My MS & Me,” which you can hear on the BBC Radio 1 site. His MS has progressed to the point that he’s now in a wheelchair, and his public presence is mostly limited to Twitter, where his profile describes him as a housebound hedonist (hey, it made ME laugh) and YouTube.

How much courage does it take to laugh out loud, in public, at an incurable disease? Jim certainly has courage at the level required.

Other examples of funny-or-die in managing chronic disease include Mark S. King’s fabulously funny My Fabulous Disease blog (Mark is HIV-positive). The aforementioned Amy Gurowitz laughs out loud about her MS in a number of places, including MS Soft Serve and MS-LOL (life of learning OR laugh out loud, you pick).

On the provider side, there are a number of docs who are breaking up the waiting rooms and wards.

Dr. Patricia Raymond is a gastroenterologist whose mission in life is to take the “ick” out of colonoscopies. She bills herself as The Fabulous Butt Meddler. Since she looks like Bette Midler, the joke works on every level.

Dr. Zubin Damania, a/k/a ZDoggMD (“Slightly Funnier Than Placebo”), is a hospital medicine specialist in Palo Alto as well as a veritable buffet of medical humor, some G-rated and some most definitely NSFW. His videos alone guarantee hours of laughter. (more…)

By Casey Quinlan. In my daily business life, I have lots of conversations about healthcare IT (HIT), electronic medical records (EMR), personal health records (PHR), and the rest of the alphabet soup of acronyms used in health care’s march into the 21^st century. Each of those conversations always winds up leading to the same question, “what’s the ROI?” Meaning what’s the expected financial benefit to the provider deploying the technology.

This is most definitely a valid question – any enterprise looking at a technology product or service needs to have a solid understanding of what the business results of that technology can be, and what the cost of those results will be. Also, the likelihood of those results actually showing up is important: what’s the track record of the system or service on offer?

Here’s where the ROI question falls short of the mark in the current health care landscape: results become all about revenue. This is a particularly sticky question in health care, given that, outside of large health systems like Kaiser Permanente or the Veterans Administration, health care IT has been more about managing information and data flow within a closed system than about sharing information with patients, other providers, or payers.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or as it’s known in arguments across the US, “health care reform”) is the best attempt yet to get everybody in health care – from major hospitals to urgent care centers, from Park Avenue ob/gyns to free clinics – into the EMR pool. The carrots driving adoption are meaningful use incentive payments. The sticks are lower reimbursement schedules for failing to adopt EMR or to achieve that meaningful use.

Looking for strictly financial ROI in this landscape is almost impossible – there isn’t enough data yet to make any accurate statements about what the return, in dollars, might be. Vendors make promises, but anyone who’s been involved in a large-scale IT implementation knows that projects take a big commitment in time and treasure, and can often stretch far beyond the original scope of the project.

The ROI on EMR won’t be visible until EMR systems have been in wide use for at least two years within a provider organization. It will take another two years to see how the creation of state, regional and national health information exchanges (HIEs) return results in time or money.

A better question for HIT in its current state is, “what will it cost to do nothing?” I don’t just mean not getting the meaningful use stimulus payments – I mean the cost to health care providers who don’t adopt EMRs, or who don’t join up with state and regional HIEs as they come online.

The push to repeal PPACA that started when the balance of power in Congress shifted after the 2010 election risks making health care worse, not better, if repeal leads us back to Square 1. Health care – all parts of the process: providers, patients, and payers – has a stake in creating a better system. From Square 1, looking for the ROI on technology that can create that better system is only half the question.

What will it cost to do nothing? The answer to that question shows the way forward.

By Casey Quinlan. I have this dream. It’s about how, when I make an appointment to see my doctor – my primary care physician – the process is easy, honors my time as much as it does my doctor’s, and winds up running smoothly for both parties.

The dream starts this way: I realize it’s time for my annual physical, or any other usual-suspects periodic visit to my PCP. I open up my browser, point it to my doctor’s website, and log in to the secure patient portal. The one where I can see all my prescriptions, my personal health record, make an appointment (using the handy calendar function), request a prescription refill, ask the nurse or doctor a question via email, or download a PDF of my health record.

In my dream, using the handy scheduling function in the portal, I select a date and time for my appointment. The portal auto-populates that date and time with my name and insurance/contact information, since I logged in and it knows who I am. The system asks me if any information has changed. I click “no”. If I click “yes,” the next screen asks me to make the changes, and “submit”.

I select “annual physical” from the list of appointment types. I enter any information I need to related to this appointment request (i.e. “Doctor, I have this pain…”). Then I click “submit” and the system sends me a confirmation email or text (I picked which one I prefer when I set up my profile on the portal). It also schedules me for a blood draw in the week prior to the appointment, sending me a confirmation for a walk-in at the lab.

The scene in my dream shifts to the day of my doctor’s appointment. I’m scheduled to be seen at 11:00am. I get a text at 10:00am – or an email, whichever I selected when setting up my portal profile – saying that the doctor’s running about 30 minutes behind. I can either come in at 11:30am, or select one of the alternate appointment times in the text/email and be re-scheduled.

I select 11:30am, and I arrive a few minutes before that time. Signing in involves scanning a key tag – just like the one you get from your favorite supermarket – which lets everyone in the practice, from the receptionist to the doctor, know that I’m there, and on time.

If the administrative staff needs to talk to me for any reason, they’ll see me on their screen (usually because, in the day-before review, they checked the “confirm insurance details” or “update pharmacy info” or “collect co-pay” radio button) and invite me to have a private conversation. By using my first name only. No sign-in sheet (HIPAA violation) or yodeling my full name across a crowded waiting room (HIPAA violation). (more…)

By Casey Quinlan. I will admit to a bias on the subject of health insurance, and healthcare reform: I’m one of the millions of America’s uninsured. I’m female, over 50 (I told you, now I’ll have to kill you), and I was diagnosed with cancer in December of 2007.

The first of those facts – being female – is the biggest dinger of the three when it comes to health insurance premiums. The reasoning there: women use more health services, starting in their teens and 20s and continuing through menopause. The second – my age – could signal a better rate, since women typically tail off in their use of healthcare in their mid-50s. However, the third fact – cancer within the last 10 years – gets me insurance coverage quotes of $2,000 per month, with a deductible between at $3,000 to $6,000 a year.

For the math-challenged, that’s between $27,000 and $30,000 out of my pocket per year before insurance covers Dollar One. Since that amounts to much of my annual pre-tax income in each of the two years since Cancer Year – 2008 was the last year I had health insurance coverage – I’ve remained on the uninsured list. And developed some fierce opinions about the future of healthcare and health insurance in the US.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a/k/a “health care reform,” passed earlier this year includes some help for my situation…in 2014. Meanwhile, I’m managing to get the oral chemo meds I’ll be taking until 2013 (which cost $500 a month) with the help of a community clinic. And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I stay as healthy as I was before the cancer diagnosis, and as I have been since I finished radiation treatment in 2008.

That’s my current health insurance policy: crossed fingers.

There are two things that I think have to happen to bring about meaningful change in the healthcare cost/payment/insurance conundrum, for me and everyone else:

1. Tort reform
2. Severing health insurance from employment

I realize that the tort bar, the health insurance industry, and pretty much everybody with a job-related health benefits package will take out a hit on me for making those suggestions. But the system has fallen, it can’t get up, and until major changes – not the chipping-away-at-the-edges approach of the current iteration of “health care reform” – are made in both the US legal system and how health insurance is marketed and sold, meaningful change doesn’t have a prayer.

How would tort reform help? Defensive medicine – practicing medicine with one eye over your shoulder looking for lawyers – adds as much as $45.6Billion-with-a-b annually to US spending on healthcare, according to a Harvard study published in September. That may seem like a drop in the bucket when the total annual spend on healthcare in this country is $2.3Trillion-with-a-t, but those dollars are all coming out of our pockets one way or another. Whether it’s in higher health insurance premiums, deductibles, fee increases to help providers cover those who can’t pay, fee increases to help defray the costs of malpractice insurance, or tax dollars for Medicaid and Medicare, we pay for it. (more…)