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Showing posts with label Health Care Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health Care Blog. Show all posts

Monday, December 9, 2013

A Plan B For Healthcare.gov?

Today's post was shared by The Health Care Blog and comes from thehealthcareblog.com
By ROBERT LASZEWSKI


It is now becoming clear that the Obama administration will not have Health.care.gov fixed by December 1 so hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of people will be able to smoothly enroll by January 1.
Why do I say that? Look at this from the administration spokesperson’s daily Healthcare.gov progress report on Friday:
Essentially what is happening is people [those working on the fixes] are going through the entire process. As we have fixed certain pieces of functionality, like the account creation process, we’re seeing volume go further down the application. We’re identifying new issues that we need to be in a position to troubleshoot.
Does that sound like the kind of report you would expect if they were on track to fix this in less than three weeks? Their biggest problem is that they admittedly don’t know what they don’t know.
The spokesperson also reiterated the administration intends to have Obamacare’s computer system “functioning smoothly for the vast majority of users” by the end of the month.
It’s time for the Obama administration to get real.
It takes months to properly test a complex data system like this. Two things are obvious:
  1. When they launched on October 1, very little of the testing had been completed.
  2. They are now in the midst of that many months long testing and fixing period. It is clear they don’t have a few weeks of work left; they have months of work left.
    As Senate Finance...
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The Great Coronary Angioplasty Debate: Giving Patients the Right to Speak | The Health Care Blog

Today's post was shared by The Health Care Blog and comes from thehealthcareblog.com

By Nortin Hadler, MD
Earlier this month, the editors of THCB saw fit to post my essay, “The End of the Era of Coronary Angioplasty.”
The comments posted on THCB in response to the essay, and those the editors and I have directly received, have been most gratifying. The essay is an exercise in informing medical decisions, which is my creed as a clinician and perspective as a clinical investigator.
I use the recent British federal guideline document as my object lesson. This Guideline examines the science that speaks to the efficacy of the last consensus indication for angioplasty, the setting of an acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). Clinical science has rendered all other indications, by consensus, relative at best. But in the case of STEMI, the British guideline panel supports the consensus and concludes that angioplasty should be “offered” in a timely fashion.
I will not repeat my original essay here since it is only a click away. The exercise I display is how I would take this last consensus statement into a trusting, empathic patient-physician discourse. This is a hypothetical exercise to the extent that little in the way of clear thinking can be expected of a patient in the throes of a STEMI, and not much more of the patient’s caring community.
So all of us, we the people regardless of our credentials, need to consider and value the putative efficacy of angioplasty (with or without stenting) a priori. For me, personally, there is...
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