For our readers

Driving forces / For our readers / Retail clinics — Comments Off
14
Apr 10

Real Life in Retail Health: The Real Deal

We’ve posted links to blog entries at Real Life in Retail Health before, but wanted to take a moment to tell you plainly that if you are NOT regularly checking in on Jennifer Ford’s blog, you are missing a very vital resource for keeping track of retail health news.

Sure, we’re quick with snarky comments, and have a bug for keeping track of retail clinics locations – but they live the practitioners’ life, which is where a whole lot of the action is. Do yourself a favor: at very least, bookmark RLIH now. Thank me later.

Driving forces / For our readers — Comments Off
2
Sep 09

Concentrating on the Concentration of Health Spending

A word about our obsessions.

Here at Healthcare 311, we have a thing for data on the concentration of US health spending. That data incontrovertibly shows that health spending is extremely unevenly distributed*. That means two things:

  • that is there is a vast difference between the amount spent on those who receive the most care and those who receive the least care, AND
  • the number of people on whose care the most is spent is much, much smaller than the number on whom little or nothing is spent. In fact, the number on whom little or nothing is spent is most of us.

There’s more in these documents from Kaiser Family Foundation & the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (also from AHRQ). While some of the data is several years old, the concentration of health spending has been relatively stable for decades, so the picture the data presents remains relevant.

These 3 sentences from the KKF document are illustrative (our emphases):

While discussions about the costs of health care often focus on the average amount spent per person, spending on health services is actually quite skewed. About ten percent of people account for 63% of spending on health services; 21% of health spending is for only 1% of the population. At the other end of the spectrum, the one-half of the population with the lowest health spending accounts for just over 3% of spending.

We know, we know: everyone knows these facts. What puzzles us is why knowing them does not have more impact on our thinking about how to fix health care.

Knowing them, and thinking about them a lot, we have come to believe that the easiest, most convenient way to “re-form” health care in the US is to focus relentlessly on

  • finding affordable ways to keep those of us in the “most of us” category healthy, so the amount we spend on our care does not grow much; AND
  • doing a better job of managing the large amount spent on the smallest share of the population that really needs resource-intensive care.

*we’re neither statisticians nor mathematicians, but we understand the extreme skew of health care costs over the US population describes what is known as a “power law distribution“.

For our readers — Comments Off
22
Jun 09

Easy Guide to Healthcare 311 News

What Healthcare 311 News Is

Healthcare 311 News is a running collection of brief notes & commentary on news about initiatives of all kinds that have been undertaken to make routine health care easier & more convenient.

We use “routine health care” to identify the care people can get, or should be able to get, on their own schedule & under their own power. That means we won’t be talking much about complex surgeries or treatments that involve lots of expensive technology, except when innovations emerge that make these things less difficult and less inconvenient.

We talk mostly about health care in the US context.

Examples of likely Healthcare 311 News topics

  • What the concentration of health care usage means for health care and convenient care
  • Why 70% of routine health care in life is showing up
  • Identifying the “jobs to be done” by routine health care


    • What Healthcare 311 News is not

    Clinical: Healthcare 311 News is not published by doctors, and is not expressly for health care professionals. We hope clinicians will comment regularly on their views about the clinical implications of easy care initiatives.

    Legal: Healthcare 311 News is not about the parsing of laws or regulations, or of proposed laws or regulations. Laws and regulations will inevitably be referenced, and sometimes discussed, but rarely as the focal point of any post.

    Political: We feel what is happening is more interesting than who is in favor of it. We may mention who is in favor of an easy health care initiative, and/or who is against it, but we probably won’t dwell on it.