For as long as the Medicare program has been in existence, coverage for wellness and preventive-care examination have not been part of the traditional benefit. Fee-for-service Medicare had focused on illness-care and chronic disease management. Much of its budget was spent in hospital care, as...

Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is an important element in improving health care delivery. Given the dramatic variation in health care costs from one locale to another (the Dartmouth Atlas experience), prompting rank-and-file physicians with standard-of-care guidelines (one way of implementing CDS), at the point of...

Last week, I was ill. I was coughing, sweating, aching, spinning, you name it. With a whole mess of sickness flowing through my immune system, I had little to no energy left to be my ol’ self. I haven’t been this sick in a long...

Thanks to some connections at Microsoft I was made aware of some very interesting data that was published on the Windows Azure Data Marketplace by Practice Fusion – de-identified medical records of 5,000 patients. Of course, I had to take a look. What I found...

Does the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems get in the way of doctor-patient interaction? Does it make the doctor-visit experience colder and more distanced – more dehumanized? Is there more interaction with the tools, at the expense of the emotional connection that comes...