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This is funny and a humor depiction of how he transmitted children to his wife, happens to other people but when it happens to you, it’s real. This has a few images as the title states it’s uncensored. The TV doctor helped him out, and what a big baby but video is funny. BD
In this uncensored survivor's tale, Jason Jones gets a vasectomy and fondly remembers his balls.
Additional information and improvements have been made to Medicare.Gov and as a resource you can always find the link to the site on this blog under resources on 
the right hand side. In addition you can also find information on how to use the Blue Button to download your Medicare Information on file. I actually like the MD locator as unlike the commercial sites that do this, Medicare is not attempting to create a monster for MDs to keep up with updating their information. In addition you can also find some information specific to Medicare on what the various doctors honor at their practices. In addition VA facility information has been included under the Hospital Compare services area. BD
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has launched a single online location for consumers to find quality information about hospitals, nursing homes and physician offices so they can make informed choices about their health care.
CMS unveiled a quality “compare” finder portal so consumers can easily link to and evaluate the quality of care and services of providers in various health service sectors and get their contact information.
The agency also updated its Hospital Compare website to include how well hospitals protect outpatients from surgical infections and whether hospitals use proven therapies that reduce the risk of death on outpatients treated for suspected heart attacks.
Hospital Compare now includes information from the Veterans Affairs Department medical centers.
CMS wants consumers to have online tools available so they can act on information about where to receive high-quality care, said Dr. Don Berwick, CMS administrator.
CMS unveils quality compare finder portal | Government Health IT
Luckily nobody was hurt, and this is the nuclear medicine area of the hospital, not a good thing when in the middle of an MRI for sure. BD
NATICK, Mass. -- A vehicle has crash into Metro West Medical Center's Natick campus but no injuries were reported.
A man in his 60s trying to leave the parking lot fired up his Mustang and crashed right through the side of the building.
“The patient had backed into the parking spot and had accelerated out of the parking spot and went right through the wall…primarily just some sheetrock and plywood…nothing structural,” said Chief James Sheridan of the Natick Fire Department.
I think we all could admit to agreeing with the one statement at the end of this article that says the single payer system cuts down paper work and time and this was a study to also compare the work of Canadian doctors to those in the US. If as a patient you have not had the opportunity to see some of this in action, just wait until you receive a denied claim or referral and the fur and time begins to fly.
When doctors can’t handle and get their requests handled by their staff, then it becomes the patient issue as well and many have already had to deal with this and it’s not fun. Each carrier is different on some items, and even different than Medicare when it comes to coding. Everybody is not speaking the same dialect of the common language. Electronically filed claims help out but those are not the issues that take the time for the most part and sail on through. This is the area in which I began in healthcare in seeing the processes and coming from a very updated industry in logistics, I originally could not believe my eyes. Today with using many 3rd party entities to help in this area, the referral and claim information might be even outside the insurer’s office too.
There’s a lot of competition in the algorithm processing business of claims and referrals as risk assessments get included and some of the 3rd parities in the last couple of years have been purchased by insurers, so it can get a little more 
complicated. Yesterday I wrote about Emdeon being purchased and last year Cigna cut out their exclusive agreement with the company to use another 3rd party Health IT claim algorithm company, Ingenix (now Optum renamed) so they in fact with using their Health IT services at Cigna now put bottom profits to United Healthcare via the use of subsidiary Health IT companies, interesting isn’t it and sometimes as per this article adds to the additional time and money that doctors spend to get the desired patient care and it all takes time away from seeing patients and the doctor’s bottom lines.
There’s also this situation to where with a post audit that claims are rescinded and the amount is just deducted from a current reimbursement check and that makes it hard for the practice with bookkeeping as the claims being paid on and EOB might not be related at all to the claim being rescinded and being deducted, and then going back and properly crediting the amounts paid becomes a real big nightmare with proper applying of payment dollars. BD
Health insurance costs aren't just a patient concern. Dealing with health insurance paperwork costs American doctors an average of nearly $83,000 per year.
That's the cost of the time and labor it takes for physicians' employees to correspond with various insurance plans about claims, coverage and billing for patient care and prescription drugs.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs, found that Canadian physicians spend about a fourth as much as their American counterparts to complete their necessary paperwork.
In terms of time, paperwork takes an average of nearly 21 hours per week for American physicians versus slightly more than 2 hours per week on average for Canadian physicians.
"The major difference between the United States and Ontario is that non-physician staff members in the United States spend large amounts of time obtaining prior authorizations and on billing," wrote Dante Morra, an assistant professor from the University of Toronto.
American physicians must interact with many different insurers, which have different rules and methods for filing claims. They also must spend time obtaining authorization for certain medical procedures, which, the authors said, can ultimately save money and prevent doctors from giving inappropriate care.
Canada has a single-payer health system, which means physicians are filing only one type of paperwork.
Health insurance cost: Health insurance paperwork costs doctors plenty - OrlandoSentinel.com
This is good as so many medical devices use software today and ensuring safety along with a thorough check of the software is a grand idea. I never minded 
anyone else debugging anything I wrote and was happy to have another programmer look at it, it’s how it works today. Technology is great but nobody and I mean nobody is 100% as when you think about it, why do we have Windows updates, Mac Updates and Linux updates? It’s a constant process and granted device software is complex and doesn’t have the huge areas of an operating system to verify but the more experienced programmers and/or engineers you have look at it, the better off we all are.
You have to stop and think how fast this market is moving and for years many devices didn’t have software, but today they do. Get the FDA the budget and engineers they need to make it work. They know their business better than any lawmaker, so let them function and get some digital literacy with Congress to realize that laws can’t fix what the FDA needs all the time. The software runs the electrical portions of the devices. BD
Following last week's draft guidance recommending that pacemakers be reclassified as Class III devices that require premarket approval for FDA review, the watchdog agency released a new proposed rule today that would put the external devices used to alter a pacemaker's electrical operating performance in the same category.
Pacemaker programmers non-invasively communicate with the implanted device to modify the rate of pacing or other operating characteristics.
It’s all about health IT and analytics. I try to cover most of the analytics as best I can 
here but can you see the huge amounts of money spent with analytical algorithms to run healthcare today! The company also has a section to offer assistance with setting up insurance exchanges. Buy software to control cost is the name of the game it seems all over the US. Health risk assessments are also listed on the website.
Fro the Connextions Website:
“Every touch point along a customer lifecycle is a revenue opportunity just waiting to happen. With our deep knowledge of buying behavior, comprehensive technology, and superior team of sales, retention and relationship experts, we transform routine conversations into opportunities to convert leads and improve customer persistency – all while driving down costs and delivering an unparalleled customer experience. 
Actionable business intelligence and analytics-driven contact strategies support our skilled agents, who engage and inspire your target audiences. Our technology lifts the results of your marketing spend and shows you customer interaction results for a crystal clear, real-time view of what's working and what's not.”
You can see from the screenshot below listing most major insurers as clients and wonder how this will change? It really gets interesting with mergers and acquisitions with subsidiaries doing business with full on competitors as far as basic health insurance is concerned, in other words this subsidiary now if current contracts are maintained, they make money from Blue Cross and Aetna as a subsidiary of United Healthcare. There’s a lot of this out there which brings about some “gray” areas as far as figuring out who does what sometimes.
United and their subsidiaries have certainly been on a buying spree the last couple of years to even purchasing physicians groups such as this very large MD group in California.
In addition the algorithms used for some of the software sales are also patented such as this example with another owned subsidiary. 
In addition we hear of investments outside the US, such as China Gate, an acquisition of Optum, (under the Ingenix name) last year and you can read more at the link below and see a clearer picture of the subsidiary daisy chain as it builds. It does get very confusing when you want to track down and just see where profit dollar go today.
Anyway all in all you can absolutely see the literal gold mine here with insurers such as United and Aetna jumping in to acquire additional companies in the “algorithm” analytics business and it keeps moving. I
know as a consumer with all the software being pushed at such rapid levels it does get confusing at times. One other item that is of interest to note about analytics is the fact that now with machine learning we are entering a world of writing unreadable coding, aka algorithms and as more and more healthcare algos work together, this is something worth pondering as algorithms work on auto pilot with others and we have some very complex issues that the Quant on Wall Street are working desperately to try and figure out and this is everybody’s problem in the data business. Take a look and see how this video points out how to look for some of this in the world today as it’s out there. 
Life looks great today if one is an algorithm but not necessarily the same for all of us humans today that walk the line of analytics in our face with almost every move we make today. BD
EDEN PRARIE, MN – Population health management company OptumHealth – formerly Ingenix – announced Wednesday it will acquire healthcare services and customer relations company Connextions Inc., in a deal eyeing the ongoing shift toward consumerism in the insurance and healthcare market.
The combined company will offer a broad array of services to health insurance carriers via OptumHealth, which provides services to plan members to help them better manage their health, and Connextions’ customer service outsourcing, which helps to both recruit and retain new members.
OptumHealth to buy healthcare services company Connextions | Healthcare Finance News
One more public company to go private and into the hands of private equity. 
Emdeon has made several acquisitions of their own over the last few years such as this one from GE and more recently the purchase of Chapin Revenue Cycle for business intelligence.
One large profitable Venture backed HMO, Bravo who is still kicking in record profits since their acquisition uses services for electronic services from Emdeon to check for eligibility. Emdeon is another 3rd party company that supplies business intelligence software to hospitals, providers, etc. in the area of claim payments and more. Here’s a part of the package is that is marketed, “Denial Manager”. You might want to read up and check this out as this appears to be one of the programs a claim processing company may need to provide substantiation on coding, etc. when abuse or fraud is detected…more algorithms for processing claims and where the bucks are at with many cashing in here on Health IT.
Business deals as business models change quite frequently in healthcare today too as mentioned at the link below.
This change allowed for Cigna to shop around and sign up for some work with the United Health Care subsidiary Ingenix, (now called Optum) so you can see where the chase for the formulas and numbers lies in revenue cycling sales and the priorities given here. These are all the financial algorithms folks. Some of the revenue cycling and claim processing partnerships get very interesting today when you follow the daisy chain of subsidiaries and finally see who’s bottom line the profits feed.
“The Emdeon Denial Manager solution allows providers to organize and manage remittance inventory; helps staff arrange, prioritize and monitor denials and 
underpayments; and allows the accurate reporting and viewing of the denied and adjusted amounts. With the information produced by Emdeon Denial Manager, providers streamline the denial management process by determining root causes, patterns and process breakdowns responsible for denials, and establishing corrective steps to prevent future revenue loss or delay.”
As of late last year, Blackstone also owns about 66% of Vanguard Health Systems and I am not aware of any changes but just quoting a timeline here as Vanguard purchases bankrupts or near bankrupt facilities and then invests with capital improvements as what occurred at the Detroit Medical Center last year. At Davos this year reporters caught up with the Chairman of Blackstone and there’s a video here with more information.
It certainly does get complicated today trying to keep track of who owns who and how much of “who” is owned and where the financials all link with our complicated financial and healthcare formulas today (the algorithms). Emdeon had sales of 1 billion last year and net income of over $19 billion. BD
The Blackstone Group agreed on Thursday to buy Emdeon, a medical data services provider, for about $3 billion, including debt, in the latest takeover within the health care services industry.
Under the terms of the deal, Blackstone will pay $19 a share in cash, 17 percent above Emdeon’s closing price on Wednesday.
Emdeon’s biggest shareholders, the private equity firms General Atlantic and Hellman & Friedman, have both agreed to vote in favor of the deal. Together the two firms own about 70 percent of Emdeon’s stock.
$80 billion a year is what is spent by the government on information technology and we struggle to get our money’s worth. Mr. VanRoekel plans to continue the project 
already in place by Mr. Kundra who leaving to go to Harvard soon. With 15 years of experience at Microsoft it will be interesting to see how he lead the country in this area as well and not that doesn’t mean they are the favored vendor by any means.
I hope this ends up being a good reaction from our digital illiterate lawmakers on the Hill though and perhaps they will take notice. From what it noted below Mr. VanRoekel served as an assistant to Bill Gates so it sounds like his background was pretty interesting and varied as well as the couple of years spent at the FCC. BD
Steven VanRoekel, a former Microsoft executive, will become the next chief information officer for the federal government — a bigger, more policy-oriented technology job than any he held at the software giant.
Mr. VanRoekel worked for Microsoft for 15 years, including a stint as an assistant to Bill Gates, the co-founder. Mr. VanRoekel was a supporter of President Obama, attended the inauguration, and after a conversation with Julius Genachowski, the new chairman of the F.C.C., went to work for him.
As the government’s chief information officer, Mr. VanRoekel said he planned to move ahead with the work Mr. Kundra began.
“We’re trying to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government,” Mr. VanRoekel said.
White House Picks New Information Chief - NYTimes.com
Here we go again with Dendreon back in the news again. It seems that with the politics, cost and so forth of the drug the mission got out of hand. Yes they had to spend a bunch of money on software too. This is all over healthcare and part 
of the big expense that many don’t see as it’s an intangible. The link below was from August of 2010. Even a drug today requires IT infrastructure to monitor, report, and just overall keep track of every entity the drug touches.
“In addition to the CAPA solution, Dendreon also will implement Pilgrim’s solutions for change control management, audit tracking, regulatory commitments and customer complaints, and SmartInsight, Pilgrim’s Business Intelligence tool for generating business user-centric compliance and quality management reports.”
In addition, Medicare said they were going to pay for the drug and it’s treatment process and it’s one of the most expensive on the market and right here this makes one huge point for allowing the government to negotiate drug prices that they will pay.
Just as a note, their own internal software processes were part of the FDA approval process as well. This was not the first time the CEO has dumped a big portion of stock either. If you have followed the story over the years he’s done very well but now will the company may have to lay off people if the numbers don’t come together? BD
Dendreon (DNDN) has done it again: the company that makes the $93,000 prostate cancer drug Provenge pulled its investor guidance today after admitting there is no way it can meet its revenues estimate for 2011. The company has been bedeviled by conspiracy theories about whether its drug actually works and hedge funds secretly shorting its stock, insider transactions and a general lack of transparency from CEO Mitchell Gold. Worse, Gold dumped $1 million in DNDN stock after he scheduled today’s earnings call back in July.
Dendreon CEO Dumped $1M in Stock Before Withdrawing Revenue Guidance | BNET
This is good news for Arizona and it will be used. I grew up in Arizona and those 
bites hurt. Those are nasty little characters when they bite, so good more here by all means. BD
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Anascorp, the first specific treatment for a scorpion sting by Centruroides scorpions in the United States.
Venomous scorpions in the U.S. are mostly found in Arizona. Severe stings occur most frequently in infants and children, and can cause shortness of breath, fluid in the lungs, breathing problems, excess saliva, blurred vision, slurred speech, trouble swallowing, abnormal eye movements, muscle twitching, trouble walking, and other uncoordinated muscle movements. Untreated cases can be fatal.
Anascorp, Centruroides (Scorpion) Immune F(ab’)2 (Equine) Injection, is made from the plasma of horses immunized with scorpion venom. Anascorp may cause early or delayed allergic reactions in people sensitive to horse proteins. The manufacturing process for Anascorp includes steps to decrease the chance of allergic reactions and to reduce the risk of transmission of viruses that may be present in the plasma.
Press Announcements > FDA approves the first specific treatment for scorpion stings
This is a breath of fresh air to see a technology company and not an 
insurer build a claims processing IT infrastructure. I make the comment as in the past that’s about all who has been processing claims and insurers are even buying up the 3rd parties that interact with auditing and checking for accuracy etc. as well. Last year HP was also awarded a contract for Quality Control for the EHR stimulus program. Actually with HP gaining government contracts with some of the posts made here has made a good impression with MDs as they have briefly commented. BD
Press Release:
PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 3, 2011 – HP Enterprise Services today announced that Massachusetts’ Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), designed and built by HP for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, has received full federal certification.
The accreditation by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ensures that Massachusetts will receive maximum federal funding for the system’s implementation and ongoing operation. Funding is retroactive to the system’s first day of operation.
The Massachusetts certification marks the 10th HP interChange MMIS to earn federal accreditation.
The new system processes approximately 75 million eligibility verifications and 80 million claims from healthcare providers worth $6.5 billion per year. It is used by the state’s 24,000 Medicaid providers and delivers:
— An enhanced provider web portal (Provider Online Service Center) featuring online enrollment, real-time claims processing and status updates, member eligibility inquiries, prior authorization approvals, and enhanced security.
— A service-oriented architecture that integrates and secures information exchange, including member updates from the agency’s multiple determination systems as well as interactive services for providers and other systems improving efficiency.
— Online self-service features that have increased enrollments and significantly reduced paper transactions, improving client experience as well as lowering waste consumption.
— Features that consolidate health data and operational processes such as member enrollment and card issuance, eliminating the need to access multiple systems.
“The federal certification of Massachusetts’ MMIS is the result of hard work and collaboration by the Office of Health and Human Services and HP,” said Dr. Julian Harris, director, Massachusetts Medicaid. “The system we implemented is user friendly and efficient, benefiting Medicaid providers and citizens across Massachusetts.”
“The new Massachusetts Medicaid claims system is a valuable resource for Medicaid providers like us,” said Sara Hartman, vice president, Association of Behavioral Healthcare. “It brings the claim system into the 21st century, supporting the business practices of the behavioral health providers, the efficient and timely payment of claims, as well as the increased compliance with state and federal regulations.”
HP is the nation’s largest provider of Medicaid and Medicare process management services, administering $95 billion in benefits a year. It serves as the fiscal agent or principal IT provider for Medicaid in 21 states. HP’s global health care experience spans payer, provider, government and life science communities.
“As states prepare for the entry of millions of new Medicaid patients into the system over the next few years, they are looking for flexible, yet powerful information systems to ease administrative and provider workloads,” said Susan Arthur, vice president, U.S. Healthcare, HP Enterprise Services. “Using our industry-leading certification experience while collaborating closely with the state of Massachusetts and a provider advisory group, we were able to successfully deliver a user-friendly, federally certified MMIS.”
HP is helping the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services in the pursuit of Instant-On Government. In a world of continuous connectivity, the Instant-On Government embeds technology in everything it does to serve employees, partners and citizens with whatever they need instantly.
About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud and connectivity, creating seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.
We like Dr. Michelson at the Medical Quack as I wrote back a few months ago with an update and background information that was featured in the LA Times. I think 
everyone else who reads here too that is an animal lover and any doctor who works in healthcare can agree, it’s nice to see someone’s work rewarded and not ripped off by companies like Medtronic which was what happened to him and he fought and was well compensated in court and he’s now retired after years of practicing as a surgeon and inventor at the same time. Many of the devices he created are still used today in surgical procedures.
He announced this program a few years ago, the day after the Blue Cross X-Prize publicity stent of a $10 million dollar prize to solve healthcare and you by today's world of care that’s exactly what it was. Dr. Michelson though has his prize of $25 million for the sterilization of cats and dogs without a surgical procedure hanging out there and it’s moving along according to the press release below.
You can read below for the details on the grants given so far and a little bit about the investigators working on the project. Nice. BD
Press Release:
Los Angeles, CA – (August 3, 2011) – Across the world, research is under way at more than a dozen institutions to use cutting-edge science in the development of a non-surgical sterilant for dogs and cats – an innovative experiment in solving the problem of pet overpopulation and chance for scientists to cash in on a $25 million prize. 
In 2008, Found Animals Foundation, a privately funded Los Angeles-based non-profit group, announced the launch of this unique program, the Michelson Prize & Grants, named after Found Animals’ creator Dr. Gary Michelson, a billionaire orthopedic spinal surgeon who wants to see a decrease in the 3-4 million animals euthanized each year in U.S. shelters. In addition to the $25 million incentive to the first person to successfully develop a nonsurgical method for sterilizing cats and dogs, the Michelson Grants in Reproductive Biology offers up to a total of $50 million in funding for promising research in pursuit of non-surgical sterilization technology.
Since the announcement, Found Animals has received more than 150 letters of intent for the Michelson Grants, and has invited over 50 investigators to submit full grant proposals. To date, 15 of those grants have been approved totaling more than $6 million in research funding. Currently, research is under way everywhere from Australia and Argentina to California and Virginia, among several other states in the U.S.
“We are thrilled with the high level of interest we’ve seen from qualified applicants to date and we are confident that we’ll see many more proposals of equal excellence in the future,” said Aimee Gilbreath, Executive Director of Found Animals. “What’s even more exciting is that we’re seeing proposals based on new technologies such as nanocontainers and gene silencing, meaning that researchers are applying cutting edge science to this problem – which was our hope when launching the program.”
Surgical spay/neuter procedures are the current standard for sterilizing animals. While this approach is relatively safe and effective, it is not an ideal. Spay and neuter procedures require general anesthesia and an adequately equipped surgical facility, both of which create obstacles for pet owners such as high costs, transportation of animals and inherent risks of surgery. A single dose, non-surgical sterilant would be a more effective solution to defer cost and inconvenience for many pet owners, according to experts.
To review proposals for funding, regular meetings are scheduled with the Found Animals’ Scientific Advisory Board, made up of top scientists from a wide variety of relevant fields including reproductive biology, immunology, biotechnology, drug development, and animal welfare. Many of the board members have recently completed their first two-year term and are currently being renewed for a second term.
“Through the interest we’ve seen so far, we’re confident this innovative program is moving in the right direction and we’re excited about what’s in store with this group of elite researchers,” said Shirley Johnston, D.V.M., Ph.D., a leading expert on animal reproduction and a respected veterinarian, who serves as Director of Scientific Research for Found Animals and oversees the prize and grants program.
The official application process for the $25 million Michelson Prize is now available on the Found Animals website, in addition to valuable resources for scientists interested in applying for the prize and grant program, including presentations from the symposium on non-surgical sterilization, a canine and feline reproduction guide and a toolkit of quality assurance best practices including downloadable forms.
For more information, visit http://michelson.foundanimals.org/.
ABOUT FOUND ANIMALS
Found Animals Foundation is a privately funded Los Angeles based non-profit organization dedicated to animal welfare issues and led by business and medical professionals. The Found Animals team works directly within the animal welfare community to improve animal shelter processes, fund pet sterilization research, promote effective animal welfare policy, and provide funding to area shelters and spay/neutering clinics. The organization also sponsors and promotes pet adoption, pet spay and neutering, microchipping programs, and various animal and pet-related events.
I’ll be a little bit of a devil’s advocate here and discussed the stress of having a device that is going to sound off at any time and wonder if we are ready for this? Again the technology is good to be aware but has anybody thought about the 
psychological effects of such devices? Will we want to walk around with either an implanted or external device that can send off a “red” alert at any time? A couple days ago I posted about an implanted device that will basically do the same thing.
Perhaps after using such a device over time some of the anxiety might lessen but initially I think anxiety is a concern with potential stress of a device going off and the response one may get. What if you have a false positive and it’s not a real heart attack, would that give you a heart attack? Nobody wants a heart attack, self included here and we of course want the best care but in the pursuit of early warnings is this something that we should also consider? Sometimes when the phone rings and I see it’s from someone I don’t want to talk to sets off some stress and that’s a minor issue compared to a heart attack by all means.
I think this sounds like it could be a good project for the folks who work with participatory sensing with devices to take a look at to make sure it’s done correctly and so we don’t have the stress of a device causing the opposite effect as you have to remember we have a lot of other mobile device action taking place today too. BD
ZOLL Medical Corp. (NSDQ:ZOLL) and Vicor Corp. (NSDQ:VICR) have teamed up to provide patient monitoring systems that can predict imminent heart attacks and warn patients and caregivers in real time.
Vicor's PD2i analyzer uses a nonlinear algorithm to examine a heartbeat for patterns that reveal risky brain-heart interaction that could put a patient at risk of death.
"Given the PD2i(R)'s ability to detect a patient's risk of tachyarrhythmia in time for a warning to be issued to the patient and/or caregiver, we are pleased to be able to utilize this technology in our resuscitation devices, many of which are not only therapeutic but also used to monitor patients prior to an acute event," Zoll president Jonathan Rennert said in prepared remarks.
No wonder Intel bought them, saw some value here for sure. It just seems like the hacking never ends but what was found here has more vital interest to national security issues and company secrets exposed and it appears to have all been from one source which the McAfee can’t reveal for obvious reasons. Anyway, with all the security breaches we have in healthcare, good video to watch and perhaps now security in Health IT will perhaps gain a bigger focus as well as those expensive and over valued social network algorithms too.
In another article in Bloomberg this morning, feast your eyes on this little artifact and see that just in the first quarter of this year how was spent on social media start up companies and ask yourself about the lack of balance in the US and where we place values today. Sure I like social networks and use them but they too have had tons of security issues as well and seem to be lacking in their security efforts and research before putting some of what we see out there on the web today.
“Private equity and venture capital funds poured a combined $2.52 billion into social media startups during the first quarter of 2011, according to the SMI Social Media Funding Guide. has a $100 million fund for iPhone software startups. Yet not a single major venture capital fund has been launched to invest primarily in companies serving the poor.”
How do they hack so efficiently? Its all in those algorithms. This is an excellent post I made below that takes time out to explain the role of algorithms today and worth the read and I’ll add the video included here below as well, it’s important as when hackers start writing the unreadable we are up a creek. This is also why we see the huge failure of lawmakers today too as they don’t carry enough digital literacy today to be informed enough on how to use such technologies to make laws for the positive side and regulation…it’s all over the news and I hope they wake up soon. You can’t make laws on issues you have no real knowledge of. BD
Massive hacking trail uncovered: McAfee | Video | Reuters.com
This is kind of a strange story and the Life Settlement business is not always written about in a favorable fashion just because of what it is and this law suit was even stranger. I think the internet is full of people expressing their opinions and we 
see it every day and so again the grounds of this suit are just strange unless there was some kind of loop hole being explored? Basically it sounds like they didn’t like the way the industry as a whole was being discussed and again when has the first amendment not been allowed? Another life settlement company earlier this year admitted to an SEC investigation on their practices.
When investors take over an insurance policy that was originally sold to an individual and looks for a return, what can you say? It kind of is what it is and there’s been plenty on the web over the years from major papers and so forth on this topic. Enter analytics and projections with behavioral analytics being used everywhere today and the algorithms and the decisions made from their use certainly opens up the doors for a lot of questions and not just for this industry as it’s everywhere. There are companies doing risk assessments all over the place to guestimate how long someone will live and it’s in the healthcare side too. We have a country stuck on analytics which is not a bad thing, but how they are interpreted and used when financial gain enters the picture is the issue. We have Dead Peasant life insurance policies that are all over the news from time to time as well and let’s face it the ethics here allow questions and opinions for anyone to pose.
This is just bizarre in nature with the filed lawsuit and again the first amendment prevails with all being able to express their opinions. BD
Life insurance settlement provider Coventry First has dropped a trademark infringement lawsuit it filed in federal court alleging anonymous defendants were posting false Twitter messages saying that it wants people to die quickly.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the suit listed "Does 1-10, inclusive," as defendants. After many anonymous attacks, including postings on Twitter, the company sued "to obtain the records from Twitter to ascertain who is behind these anonymous attacks," Alan Buerger, chief executive officer of Coventry First, told BestWire in June (BestWire, June 14, 2011).
Paul Levy, the attorney who represented the anonymous Twitter user, said Coventry First dropped the suit "when it learned what argument we were going to make in seeking sanctions against its lawyer and getting the case dismissed." The company "ignored the proper way to get into court," said Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen.
One Tweet read: "sure, maybe health ins. companies want u to die fast once you get sick but they want u healthy for a long time first. Coventry wants u dead NOW!" and "the faster people die the more coventry first profits! Not even cig companies want their customers to die as fast" (BestWire, June 14, 2011).
Coventry First, one of the largest life settlement providers in the United States, buys life insurance policies from policyowners who no longer need their insurance and aggregates these policies for institutional investors around the world.
Insurance News - Life Settlement Provider Coventry First Drops Twitter Trademark Infringement Suit
Aetna I’m sure wants to keep up with the competition in this area when you compare to the efforts of United Healthcare who owns it’s own bank with over a billion on deposit with HAS (health savings accounts) and they have options to use the money to make loans to healthcare concerns with the funds. Maybe Aetna could be on their way to some day having a bank too? 
HSAs are always up for discussion as they benefit employers with the offerings and the consumer side is not always the best as far as high deductibles to be met with most plans. As always with mergers and acquisitions today in healthcare, especially the insurer end it’s kind a good idea to pay attention here as data and money are analyzed and combined beyond what has been past practice and sometimes some business models that appear might surprise you. United has long been buying up subsidiaries and you can see the daisy chain of subsidiary companies and Aetna appears to be moving in the same direction and it’s all about analytics and algorithms. Below is a statement from their privacy disclosure…interesting…business requirements is a pretty open area when you think about it as your information is subject to something along this line here I am guessing. 
“Information will not be distributed or shared for marketing purposes or for any other purpose outside the scope of our business requirements.”
In the last year I can’t ever recall so many purchases by insurers with financial/health management analytics companies as what we have seen. It’s no longer separate entities with their algorithms for analytics as 3rd parties in many areas and seems to all be running together with data galore. BD
Aetna continued its spending spree with an announcement in July that it will buy the country's largest health savings account administrator, PayFlex, for $202 million.
PayFlex, based in Omaha, Neb., manages accounts for about 1 million enrollees. It also runs wellness programs and a range of account-based employee benefits, including transit reimbursement accounts, dependent care accounts, COBRA benefits and leave of absence benefits for employers.
The purchase will give Aetna a firm foothold in the HSA business. According to a survey released in June by insurer trade group America's Health Insurance Plans, 11.4 million Americans are enrolled in high-deductible health plans paired with an HSA that helps cover out-of-pocket health care costs. The plans are a popular way for employers to control costs and drive workers to pay attention to the cost of care because they must pay out of pocket for at least the first $1,000 of medical expenses.
By combining its own consumer account business with PayFlex, Aetna will hold about 2 million consumer-funded spending accounts, according to the company.
amednews: Aetna snaps up HSA management giant :: Aug. 2, 2011 ... American Medical News
This is an interesting product and it connects to PHRs like HealthVault and there are 
all types of analytics included for both patient and doctor use. I read through the website and the results go directly to a website and so my questions here are privacy with selling data. According to what I read the meter is free and uses normal and customary glucose strips, etc. that are normally covered but the device is free, so how do they make money? The first thought that comes to mind is either by selling data or insurer reimbursement and I didn’t see any statements to reflect either other than the fact that with someone under 13 years old would be somewhat exempt?
You can have results sent to family members, etc. and reminder and other types of notices are provided, i.e. a high reading etc. In addition to the mobile app it appears that glucose is getting social with who one decides to share their information with. If a provider were to use I would certainly hope that it would go directly to a medical record as this is the issue today with so many apps out there that doctors are pressed for time as it is much less had a full battery of apps to monitor. BD
Telcare, Inc., an exhibitor at this year's annual meeting of the American Association of Diabetes Educators, has just received clearance from the
US Food and Drug Administration to market the Telcare BGM, the first cellular-enabled glucose meter, combined with an FDA-cleared database (Telserve) to aid in the management of diabetes. The device allows patients to transmit their blood glucose readings to caregivers and family members, and receive immediate coaching and clinical feedback relayed to the screen of the glucose meter. The patient does not have to take any additional steps to transmit the data and the cost of the wireless connectivity is included in the price of the device and its accompanying test strips. Thus, users will have a much richer clinical experience at no additional cost when compared to standard glucose meters.
The Telcare glucose meter aims to bridge the last mile between patient and caregiver. Real time information is transmitted to the electronic medical record, personal health records, such as Microsoft Health Vault, and a variety of smartphone apps designed to connect patients to family members and to each other. While other marketplace solutions have relied on Bluetooth transmission to cellphones, connections of glucose meters to personal computers and cradles, or requiring the patient to manually enter results into a phone app, Telcare's solution requires no additional steps on the part of the patient.
Telcare's First-in-class mHealth Connected Glucose Meter Cleared by FDA | Benzinga.com
PaperPort has been around a long time and if you don’t find a full medical records system in place in practice today, there’s a good chance that PaperPort is at least around for document management. There’s even a small “free” account that allows for document storage in the cloud. The web service is similar to other services such as Drop Box and Sky Drive and you can synch with the desktop. They also have software that works with smartphones and Ipads.
You can also still purchase the desktop version of PaperPort as well. In addition Nuance also has a cloud connector service to where you can have a PaperPort folder so you can scan right to the cloud as well. BD
If you own a scanner, chances are you are using Nuance's Windows-based PaperPort software, the tool that has been bundled with scanners for more than 20 years. Today the company introduced version 14 of the venerable utility, a new iOS app and a cloud-based scanning solution called PaperPort Anywhere.
What is interesting is how Nuance has taken a piece of desktop PC software that has been around so long and incorporated these more modern innovations, to make a powerful way to leverage how we work between cloud and desktop programs and enable users to more closely tie in cloud storage with their desktop files.
This is a big purchase and both acquisitions are in the same or similar core business 
as Fresenius in Germany. The Medicare law provides for bundled rates and larger chains run an advantage there.
Fresenius Medical Care AG agreed to buy Liberty Dialysis Holdings Inc. for $1.7 billion, one of two acquisitions announced today to expand its U.S. clinic network.
Liberty Dialysis, a closely held company based in Mercer Island, Washington, has 260 clinics with annual revenue of about $1 billion, Bad Homburg, Germany-based Fresenius Medical said in a statement today. The deal is expected to close early next year, the German company said. Fresenius Medical also will buy U.S.-based American Access Care Holdings LLC for $385 million.
American Access runs outpatient clinics for procedures such as fistulas and grafts that give permanent surgical access to veins, reducing the need to use temporary catheters for dialysis blood-cleaning treatment. Using such procedures may help Fresenius reduce the number of expensive-to-treat infections, Clive said. Catheters also tend to make patients require higher doses of some drugs, she said.
Fresenius Medical Agrees to Buy Liberty Dialysis of U.S. for $1.7 Billion - Bloomberg
Yup, this is in California, you guessed right and it’s been a while since I had “duck” post and this one fits the bill. Cute and even walks on a leash. BD
When it comes to walking around on their own webbed feet, ducks are just ducky. But one quacker in San Diego, Calif., was recently fitted for his own pair of purple neoprene surf booties.
The fashion-conscious fowl came about his new foot attire by happenstance, according to Yvonne Cruz, the co-owner of Surf 'N' Sea Custom Wetsuits, which is located near the shore in San Diego's Ocean Beach neighborhood.
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Math–This Could be a Subject for Michael Moore to Explore and Document In a Movie
Screenings Too–Killer Algorithms Part 12–Medical Billing Codes Style
Assessing Consumer Credit Scores–Attack of the Killer Algorithms Chapter 21 With Flawed Data
Duping” Society Combined With A World of Rogue Algorithms & Flawed Data Continues In Markets As Seen With Knight Capital This Week-Attack of the Killer Algorithms Chapter 36
Study Fraud With EHR Technologies, Namely Medical Records/Billing Software Used by Hospitals– HHS And SEC Continue Getting Their Non-Algorithmic Fannies Kicked–Attack of the Killer Algorithms Chapter 46
SilverScript Senior Drug Program Sanctioned by Medicare Until the Payment And Billing Algorithms are Cleaned Up-Killer Algorithms Chapter 53
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