Medical tourism, which consists of traveling abroad to receive affordable and personalized care, scares U.S. physicians. The threat is real as more than 6 millions patients will travel abroad by 2010 compared to 750K in 2008. As a strong believer in transparency and free market, I think that medical tourism is a good thing, especially in these uncertain times. It brings to the table more competition that will be materialized by a better medical service at a more accessible price.

In fact, healthcare in the U.S. is mostly private and is not affordable. Thus, the underserved population while shopping for healthcare service will look for the best deal, that will propose a decent service without ruining them.

Right now the american physician argument against this ever growing outsourcing phenomenom is quite funny:

 “It appears that “we’re easier to sue” is the uniquely American defense to medicine outsourcing.”

In my opinion, they should first understand the motivations of the U.S. patients and assess their needs which are purely financials in most cases.  Medical tourism often resuslts in thousands if not tenth of thousdands of savings. When we know that overseas facilities are approaching the U.S. in healthcare and facilities, it is just the beginning of a profound change in the way healthcare is consumed by U.S. citizens to which American doctors will have to adapt.

The original article can be found here.

In the age of EMRs and profound technological mutation of the medical practice, doctors are still lacking a very rare commodity in their practice, time. But, as my parents have always taught me, a good doctor is one that listens very carefully to what his patient is trying to communicate to him. So, how can these tools be useful in the doctor practice, then? If they can enhance reduce the inefficient workload and free up some of his time to be used to listen and build a strong relationship with his patient.

Does the “Art of Medicine” really exist, or perhaps more importantly, can it do so in the computer age?

Computers are both the boon and the bane of medicine. Electronic medical records (EMRs) are excellent for retrieval of information about labs, medications, and past medical history of our patients. These records are much easier to access than our old paper charts. However, I feel that the Achilles Heel of these advances lies in the fact that physicians are so busy inputting information into their computers that they do not spend enough time communicating with the patient.

Communication with your patient is the epitome of the Art of Medicine. It is vital that physician and patient understand each other. This includes not only what the patient says but what they mean. This takes time, a commodity which is in short supply in the age of EMR. One should always remember a basic caveat about computers, which is, “garbage in, garbage out.” If wrong information is fed into the computer, it doesn’t matter what algorithm that you use because you will be following a false trail.

Computerization of medicine will lead to great advances if it is implemented properly. However, the way things are presently being done cheats the patient out of the most important part of the doctor patient relationship - time to communicate. I always remember the precept advanced by Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine, “Listen carefully doctor, the patient is giving you the diagnosis.”

The combination of the computer age along with the time to listen to the patient and to accurately define their problem will indeed lead to a new age in medical care, but to ignore one or the other is not to fulfill our obligation to our patients.

Paul Ravetz is a family physician.

There has been a lot of buzz around  Wolfram search engine, which is described by their authors as “a computational knowledge engine for the web”. Unlike Google and other conventional search engines, it intelligently answers requests by providing an ordered set of data.

The project originated from the makers of Mathematica, as a result, several algorithms are based on that service. If you are a scientist, an engineering student or a high school student, you will find the tool very appealing.

Health wise, the tool does not provide much more than a definition for conditions, symptoms, diagnoses and procedures.  In the other hand, for drug names, the result is better segmented and ordered. We could not expect more from a project originating from people with a scientist background.

But, for a first version and given the variety of covered topics, we should give the team a credit and should probably expect enhancements in health related searches for the next releases.

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn is a health economist and management consultant who has worked with health care stakeholders for over twenty years.

1. First tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your work as well as your popular blog, HealthPopuli.
I grew up in suburban Detroit and attended the University of Michigan where I did both my undergraduate and graduate degrees (economics, journalism, and public health). I left the haven of Ann Arbor for Philadelphia, where I joined a boutique health care consulting firm the year Medicare implemented DRGs (1983). In 1986, I moved to London with my husband (an international banker) and worked with Touche Ross (now Deloitte) in their health consultancy. This was the era of Maggie Thatcher, who tried to adopt US-style/private sector methods in the National Health Service. Thus, my timing was perfect – I worked in both the public and private sectors in the UK and with the firm’s health clients in Europe. I returned to the US in the early 1990s where I worked with a consultancy for a couple of years and decided to set up on my own in 1991 – early days for a sole proprietorship. Here’s a useful datapoint: there were no laptop PCs on the market, and fax machines were thermal. I emailed via Compuserve, Prodigy and eventually AOL. Thus, THINK-Health – my consultancy serving health stakeholders at the intersection of health and technology – was born. Over my 20+ years of consulting, I’ve worked with every sort of stakeholder organization in health: financial services, health providers, payers, government agencies, pharma and life science, medical device, patient advocacy, technology – the entire gamut.

2. How did you come to blogging? What do you enjoy most about it?

I started the Health Populi blog in 2007 to share my experience in health, economics, and policy analysis with interested readers. I write virtually every day about the one news story – a report, a survey, a news item – that I believe my readers should think about that day. It’s written through my lens as a health economist but in a popular style – thus, “Health Populi.” Health Populi started life as a proposal for a book. The publisher in NY I was negotiating with for the book commented to me, after receiving the fourth version of an outline, that the “book” called Health Populi really felt more like a blog. I thought about this, and realized – he was right!

My longtime colleague and friend, Matthew Holt, had founded The Health Care Blog a couple of years before. He warned me that a blog can take over your life to the detriment of other activities. I knew I did not want that to happen – and that I was going to continue my consulting work as my core (paid) business. So I made some decisions early about the blog: that I would stay very independent, and speak the truth as I saw it after working in my field for over two decades; that  I would commit to write daily, even when traveling out of town on business; and, that I would be as timely as possible.

What I love most about doing Health Populi is that, first and foremost, I get to write, and write about issues about which I am passionate: health access, health disparities, equity, new technology. I ‘meet’ people who have never heard of THINK-Health, and this broadens my network and generates additional potential clients – and work for THINK-Health. There is a sort of writing gene in the Sarasohn family – there are many “Sarasohn’s,” spelled with an ‘h,’ who are writers throughout the U.S., on newspapers, in the film industry, and in other venues. Thus, I don’t find the daily blogging onerous a bit; I love it! It’s part of my natural workflow, and we’re all early-birds in my household!

3. You are a member of the Health 2.0 organisation, could you tell us more about your work there?

Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya co-founded the Health 2.0 Conference which was launched in the autumn of 2007. I’ve known Matthew since he left Stanford to join Institute for the Future in Menlo Park in the 1990s. He and I closely collaborated on IFTF’s forecast into health care and IT, first focusing on “Blue Bells” – Blue Cross and Bell operating companies after AT&T’s divestiture. We’ve worked together collegially since then and he is a very valuable colleague and personal friend to me. When he and Indu started up Health 2.0, I said, “count me in!” I serve on the advisory board to the organization to help inform the conference’s agenda and other side projects we’re involved in. It is an organization whose M.O. is truly, “love is the killer app:” an open network, generous of spirit and ideas, constantly learning and morphing. This is as far afield as a traditional conference “company” as you can imagine! And the group’s growth is very strong. Our most recent conference in Boston was overflow in attendance, during this difficult economic climate. The intersection of health and the Internet is one of the few bright spots in the economy. While business models continue to morph, there are some stellar examples of programs who have found their way toward profitability and sustainability.

4. As you know, we are currently working on an Internet enabled telehealth solution Your TeleDoctor, what is your opinion about the project? Do you think it is part of the solution of today’s healthcare crisis?

I have been a proponent of telehealth for many years. As an economist, I appreciate that telehealth can extend services to unserved and under-served markets, in terms of geography and personal preferences. Telehealth can be a cost-effective modality. My concern is that every citizen should have a medical home that is supported by an information infrastructure based on open standards. This provides data liquidity and the sharing of information between clinicians and health citizens. That’s the sine qua non for participatory health where patients/citizens and clinicians co-create health. I believe that Your TeleDoctor can play an important role in this emerging scenario where people will look for convenient care on a 24×7 basis. Data generated through TeleDoctor’s encounters with patients should immediately and seamlessly populate an EHR at the medical home and/or the patient’s PHR.  The trick for the U.S. health system will be aligning incentives between patients/citizens, providers, and payers – which is beginning to happen as health citizens are taking on both more financial and clinical responsibility for their own care.

Here is an extract from the article:

“European healthcare is threatened by soaring costs and limited resources. Market tests demonstrating that telemedical services can cut costs and improve treatment are now being implemented across the continent.”

Watch the video at the end of the article, it shows how telemedicine can help get test results in a more efficient and convinient way for patients while reducing costs.

Thanks to Gert Vangool for pointing this out.

Source: ICT Results.