Take a look: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/business/smallbusiness/25health.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Sheryl Skolnick teaches the EMPH Master Class “Wall Street and Health Care: The Intersection of Cash and Care.”

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2009/07/10/medicaid-uniquely-prepared-to-deliver-on-health-care-reform/

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/09/17/2009-09-17_senates_new_health_insurance_proposal_is_step_forward_but_baby_steps_ny_experts_.html

I am at the HIT Policy Committee Certification / Adoption Workgroup in Washington DC, blogging from my iPhone.

This two day workgroup meeting is going to discuss the certification process for federal HIT policy.

If you’d like to join, please visit here

More updates to follow. (hopefully with better pictures.)

The following appeared in The Washington Post Online.

As both a physician and ordained minister, I am often called upon to heal. Whether hearts or bodies, minds or souls, healing is central to both professions. Surprisingly, I heard my President echo the same thought and it struck a chord. He cautioned health-care providers not to see medicine as mere business, a practice model which is rife with hazard. Instead, he romanticized for some and made poignant for us all the call of medicine. Armed with a mix of ego and duty, he championed all stakeholders — specifically physicians — to own the problem so that we may move forward to create solutions.

Physicians take an oath. We are taught to first do no harm. Yet, the American system of health-care delivery is fraught with unchecked abuses and unsustainable damage has been suffered. In society, we aspire to live by the edict of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” However, the culture of American medicine is too fragmented, driven by excess, ignorance and complacency. Regrettably, these attitudes have cost efficiency and indulged appetites for pricier, quantitative medical care while sacrificing value. Our system hence is in dire need of more group-accountability, individual responsibility and focus on health promotion, wellness and quality.

Collectively, we are smart enough to achieve these goals. But only if we stop demonizing the uninsured, scapegoating upfront costs as a reason to maintain the status quo and rolling over to special interest groups and fear mongers.

In Chicago in front of an audience of my peers, I heard the staggering numbers and statistics. I heard careful details concerning proposals for Medicare savings. I heard another promise not to meddle with what is right with health care and to put in place deficit-neutral reforms. There were anecdotes and lessons. He scolded those who used fear tactics for political gain. He warned against pseudo-science posing as appropriate treatment. He did not shy away from contentious buzz words which have become fodder and excuse for inaction: socialism, big government, rationing, bureaucracy, mandated coverage, taxes and trillion dollar deficits. He answered his critics, some with legitimate questions but I am certain he did not silence or satisfy them.

But I listened and heard something deeper.

What President Obama did was give meaning to why many of us choose to become physicians. Though I am saddled with medical school debt and myself uninsured, the merits of medicine are worth the endeavor to save it. Can I be hopeful and not labeled naïve? Can I offer an alternative and not be told I did not answer the question? Can I support a public option without being rebuked as un-American? The soul of medicine is at stake and it does not need a conservative or liberal approach. We cannot settle simply to claim bipartisanship, rather American ingenuity and courage offer prescriptions for healing.

Chris T. Pernell is a doctor and an ordained clergywoman in New Jersey. Two of her recent projects include a prison-based wellness program and a faith-based childhood obesity initiative. Parnell is part of the 2010 EMPH Class.

Max Nathan Sale born June 18th around 2 pm. 8lbs 11oz a little over 20 inches.
Mom, baby…Chris, Darby and Emily are all doing superb

]]> http://columbiaemph.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/introducing-max-nathan-sale/feed/ 0 Richard IMAG0214 http://columbiaemph.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/glied-nominated-to-federal-post/ http://columbiaemph.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/glied-nominated-to-federal-post/#comments Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:54:04 +0000 Richard http://columbiaemph.wordpress.com/?p=758 ]]>

From WhiteHouse.gov:

Sherry Glied, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services

Sherry Glied is Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She has extensive experience in health care financing and mental health policy research. From 1992-1993, she served as a Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, under President Bush and President Clinton. Professor Glied was a participant in President Clinton’s Health Care Task Force and headed working groups on global budgets and on the economic impacts of the health plan. Her book on health care reform, Chronic Condition, was published by Harvard University Press in January 1998. She also has substantial experience in mental health policy, particularly around issues of child and adolescent mental health policy and financing.  Professor Glied is a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on Mental Health Policy and is co-author of Better but Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the US Since 1950, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2006. 

She is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a member of the board of AcademyHealth, a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2004, she won the Research! America’s Eugene Garfield Economic Impact of Health Research Award, and is a past recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award, through which she studied the U.S. employer-based health insurance system. Glied holds a B.A. in economics from Yale University, an M.A. in economics from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Congratulations Professor Glied!

Click here for more information about the Alumni Summit for Public Health Leadership.

Comparative effectiveness research was the big topic at this meeting of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes researchers (www.ispor.org). Speakers at a Tuesday plenary session included Hal Sox, Annals of Internal Medicine editor and chair of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) panel charged with prioritizing areas for the $1.1 billion comparative effectiveness research funding in the stimulus package.

In some sense people here feel that the “comparative effectiveness” moniker is just attaching another word to what many researchers have been doing all along – finding ways to see how well health care interventions work once they are translated to the “real world” of clinical practice. This is not to say the administration’s policies will not make a difference, however. This kind of research is often conducted using large observational databases rather than a priori controlled trials, so there is a perception that more gaming of the results is possible – payers can get the answers they want from their analysis, while pharmaceutical companies can get the answers they want from competing analysis, sometimes using the same data source.

The big difference that government involvement can make, then, is breaking the stalemate on comparative effectiveness research by requiring projects it funds to be truly transparent: prospective registration of plans for how the analysis will be conducted, for instance, and requirements to make findings publicly available regardless of the result. It remains to be seen what the exact parameters of these projects will be, and whether they will vary across the agencies involved (the funding is split between AHRQ, NIH, and HHS).

The IOM panel’s report on national priorities for research is due out June 30th.

Just wanted to let you know about a new addition to the Blog Roll* courtesy of Kate Garrett.  The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has created a blog to track health care reform.  They have also created a new Twitter account for the blog, which joins their existing Twitter account for the RWJ Commission Twitter.  (RWJ is on top of the tech trends, to say the least).  We also listed several new blogs on the blog roll including: The Health Affairs Blog, Health Care Law Blog, Health Care Policy and Communications Blog, Healthcare Economist, and the Wall Street Journal Health Blog.

So that you can follow the Twitter feed, or tweets, of the RWJ foundation, we have updated our site to include their Tweet Feed. It is located on the left hand side of the blog.

If you’d like to suggest a blog to the blog roll or a Twitter user we should follow, please respond below. (You must use your Columbia Uni, although it will not be published, we will use it to confirm that you are a EMPH Student.)

*Blog Roll: Is a list of blogs on a blog (usually placed in the sidebar of a blog, in our case located on the right, under the calendar) that reads as a list of recommendations by the blogger of other blogs)