Health Wonk Review posted at The Health Care Blog

John Irvine and Matthew Holt have posted this week’s issue of Health Wonk Review at The Health Care Blog – lots of good reading. John and Matthew talk about the IOM Health Data Initiative Forum (called the “Data Palooza”) where I’m writing from today (I’m helping judge a contest on apps). Also covered is other health IT news, policy, media, and economics news. Check it out.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked by startups and new product development teams is “what’s the best way to sell my X product into a hospital?” It’s a terrific question so I reached out to a friend of mine, Steve Carbonara, who heads Sales Force Effectiveness at Bard Medical and runs his own consulting practice helping companies with their sales process. After 8 years of corporate sales experience in the health care IT industry with Misys Healthcare and Allscripts, Steve moved into a private practice, starting a consulting firm.

One of my favorite magazines, Harvard Business Review (HBR), in its latest June issue has an article called “The Ambidextrous CEO” that is worth reading because it highlights innovation in healthcare IT (with a good story from Misys), specifically around open source. Here’s a point they made that’s worth repeating: Our research suggests that firms thrive when senior teams embrace the tension between old and new and foster a state of constant creative conflict at the top.

Ever since the draft ACO regulations were released by CMS a few weeks ago, I’ve been getting lots of questions about how technical teams and CIOs should be engaged with the business side to figure out their implementation strategies (I love these questions, by the way, so keep them coming). To help clarify some important technical and implementation issues, I’ve invited Dr. Mark Segal, vice president of government and industry affairs at GE Healthcare IT, to share his thoughts on the topic.

On April 28, the West Wireless Health Institute (WWHI) will host its second Health Care Innovation Day (HCI-DC). I found last year’s event, which was very well attended, very helpful. I think WWHI’s events are quite useful because they let you meet the government officials involved in setting policy and rules for our industry. More then ever, what we do in healthcare IT and medical device development is dependent on the government so understanding their role and knowing the officials is crucial.

State and local CIOs have worked for many years to foster the exchange of data between medical providers, health insurance plans, and government agencies. Building out such health information exchange (HIE) networks has been a long, sometimes painful, journey because of complex technical and administrative challenges in implementing them. Join me for my talk on what you can learn from the public sector CIOs that have some success overcoming the technical and administrative hurdles to create scalable, flexible networks capable of leveraging the complex integration of healthcare data.

As you’re probably already aware, CMS has announced the Medicare Shared Savings Program for Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs. The new program is another incentive program, like Meaningful Use (MU), but unlike MU there are no penalties for not participating in the program. In my opinion the ACO program is far more lucrative and likely more disruptive than MU and likely to yield, if done right, more patient quality improvements than MU.

Interesting news this morning from the Wall Street Journal: Some managers believe Mr. Page will eliminate or downgrade projects he doesn’t believe are worthwhile, freeing up employees to work on more important initiatives, these people said. One project expected to get less support is Google Health, which lets people store medical records and other health data on Google’s servers, said people familiar with the matter. The statement above comes from WSJ’s article “At Google, Page Aims to Clear Red Tape” in which the reporter, Amir Efrati, lays out the case that Larry Page (the CEO that will take over April 4) is looking to streamline Google to act a bit more like a startup than the 24,000 person behemoth that it is.

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