The KHIT Blog: #HIMSS17 in Orlando

Monday, February 20, 2017

#HIMSS17 in Orlando

I'm sure it will be interesting again, but I'm not attending this year. The uncertainty of my Jaco's looming demise was a major factor. Now that he's gone (sadly had to put him down Friday), I'm still heavy with mourning. He wasn't a "pet," he was a canine family member, a total delight. At 15 years old, he still had the rambunctious playfulness of a puppy. We were lucky to have found him in 2003 (on a freeway ramp in Las Vegas, about to be run over).

I'll just follow the HIMSS trade press reports like everyone else. Last time they held the show in Orlando was 2014. I was there. I first covered the HIMSS conferences in 2012, in Las Vegas (where I was living at the time, working for the Meaningful Use REC). The 2013 conference in NOLA was great fun. As was the 2016 conference, back in Las Vegas.

Next up for me on the conference front will be this year's "AARP Innovation 50+" event, which has expanded from a one-day conference to two days.

Will continue this week with my "STEM the Denialism" effort, and try to get caught up on my endless reading.

Also, visit the excellent new site "Calling Bullshit."

"What do we mean, exactly, by the term bullshit? As a first approximation, bullshit is language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms — and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course."

___

HIMSS17 "INTEROPERABILITY"

FIRST KEYNOTE

CLOSING REMARKS

Interesting. She says that HIMSS18 will be again back in Las Vegas.

I searched the HIMSS17 news every day this week. Didn't see much beyond the usual corporate press release re-writes. The industry looks quite healthy (HIMSS, an $80+ million a year "non-profit" business, certainly is), but "transformational" IT innovations seem to be sparse at this point.

Uncertainties surrounding looming Trump administration / GOP policy reforms seem to be key this year.

I'd have certainly attended this:

US HEALTHCARE REFORM EFFORTS: NOW AND INTO THE FUTURE
February 21, 2017 — 02:30PM EST - 03:30PM EST
Orange County Convention Center
W320, Chapin Theater
Session ID: 133

Description
This session calls on two health policy experts for a discussion on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and efforts underway to implement reforms to our healthcare system. The current state of ACA implementation will be discussed as well as what issues need to be addressed in “repeal and replace” scenarios currently being considered in the US Congress as well as well as the Trump Administration. Attendees can expect to gain knowledge on the critical health reform issues and outcomes being discussed by both Republicans and Democrats.
Speaker(s):

Jonathan Gruber, PhD
Yevgeniy Feyman

Gruber, 'eh? Press report of the session:

Policy Experts Explain the Trouble with Repeal and Replace
February 22, 2017 | Healthcare Reform
By Gabriel Perna

Repeal and replace is easier said than done.

present, and future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) this week at the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, held in Orlando.

Jonathan Gruber, Ph.D., professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ACA architect with the Obama administration, was joined by Yevgeniy Feyman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a policy research organization, to give an overview of the challenges in repealing and replacing the health law. They also discussed the merits of the ACA, a collapse of the insurance market, and much more in an hour-plus session.

Gruber didn't mince words when asked to predict the road ahead for an ACA replacement. "It was a hard process to pass the Affordable Care Act. It was a year-plus process with a filibuster majority. I honestly don't see a replacement. I don't see how Republicans get enough Democrats to switch over, [and] not filibuster the law. You can't replace through direct reconciliation, you can repeal, but not replace. I honestly don't see it replaced," Gruber said.

Feyman was a little less skeptical, saying the plan proposed by Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), which allows states to go their own way with the ACA is potentially more "palatable." However, he also said he didn't think a repeal was going happen as enough Republicans will get on board.

The fact that every replacement plan proposed by Republican congressmen increases the uninsured is a significant roadblock, Gruber said, adding that repealing the law outright would cause 32 million to lose health coverage. There are 20 million who picked up insurance through the law and 12 million more through a collapse of the insurance market, he said. He also noted that insurance premiums would double.

"This is what the [Congressional Budget Office] said, this is not biased Jon Gruber," he said. The CBO predicted that the elimination of the Medicaid expansion and insurance subsidies would cause up to 32 million to lose coverage by 2026...

Interesting news coverage all week of numerous GOP "town hall" constituent meetings replete with angry people now flipping out over the realization that they may soon be without health insurance. But, hey, House Speaker Paul Ryan will "Put patients back in control of their health care." HSA's, vouchers, block grants, problem solved.

Meanwhile, Mr. Speaker will continue to avail himself of his 70% subsidy, generous FEHB program.
__

NEUROBABBLE UPDATE

Interesting book review over at SBM:

Daniel and Tana Amen’s Book The Brain Warrior’s Way: Standard Health Advice Mixed with Misinformation and Fanciful Ideas
Daniel Amen, the media-savvy psychiatrist and promoter of SPECT scans, has teamed-up with his wife Tana to write a self-help book that hopelessly muddles good medical advice with misinformation and speculation

So much neurobabble, so little time. SBM is a great site.

@Health2con update

A Million Jobs in Healthcare’s Future

____________

More to come...

No comments:

Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

The KHIT Blog

Search the KHIT Blog

Monday, February 20, 2017

#HIMSS17 in Orlando

No comments:

Post a Comment