Category: Health

Can technology bend the health care cost curve?

Today’s healthcare tab in the U.S. exceeds some $2.5 trillion, and there are plenty of wasted greenbacks in that eye-popping figure. Information technology has the potential to reduce waste, and that’s why Raghu Santanam is researching healthcare uses of IT and their impacts. This professor of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business recently used his one-year sabbatical from teaching to conduct studies at the Mayo Clinic’s Center for the Science of Healthcare Delivery.

What pacemaker is this? The value of unique device identification

Recent high-profile cases where implantable cardioverter-defibrillator leads and metal-on-metal hip implants failed have drawn attention to the need for use of unique device identification or UDI. Natalia Wilson, co-director of the Health Sector Supply Chain Research Consortium says in a recent report that the first step to a more effective system of monitoring device performance and protecting patient safety is to implement a UDI system integrated with electronic health records.

What price health? Interpreting medical charges

With the healthcare sector moving toward greater price transparency, soon people will be aware of the cost of the medical goods and services they consume — often for the first time. That information will have a profound impact on the way consumers make decisions to acquire medical goods and services and even assess their own risk of contracting diseases, according to new research by Assistant Marketing Professor Adriana Samper.

Consumer-driven health care leads to reform, innovation

Even as the U.S. begins implementation of one of the most comprehensive healthcare policies ever passed, Regina Herzlinger, a leading researcher and long-time advocate of consumer-driven healthcare, argues that policy cannot fix the broken healthcare system. Speaking at a conference hosted by the W. P. Carey School of Business, Herzlinger said it will be consumer-focused entrepreneurial innovation that fixes the system — providing that politicians, providers, insurers, and others with vested interests in the status quo get out of the way.

Bridging the gap between health sector supply chain research and practice

The annual research dissemination conference of the W. P. Carey School’s Health Sector Supply Chain Research Consortium is designed to bring practitioners and researchers together to talk about new knowledge and practical issue. The journals edited at the W. P. Carey School can also be a source of game-changing new ideas.

Former Medicare administrator: How to solve the tough problems that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t

For some Americans, the Affordable Care Act – sometimes referred to as Obamacare – was supposed to fix all of the healthcare industry’s problems. It hasn’t, explained Gail Wilensky, who delivered the 2012 Mark McKenna Lecture. Wilensky, a senior fellow at Project HOPE and a former administrator of what is now the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spoke about the significant problems that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t solve and what needs to be done to solve them now.