Week’s Best of Blogs
In what is planned to become a regular piece on Hospital Buyer, this posting describes some blog postings from the healthcare world this week.
The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog included a piece “Health Services Priced to Move” which details the convoluted means required in order to transform cost and pricing in the healthcare arena. In fact, the piece authored by Jacob Goldstein suggests that changes to the costs and pricing in the system will happen incrementally, especially if there are hopes that such will be effective. Mr. Goldstein insinuates that an important factor motivating change across the system are patients themselves who shop around for better and less expensive insurance coverage.
Another posting, on Medical Devices Today, notes the difficulties of using medical devices at home which are actually designed for use within hospital facilities in a posting on the site’s Weblog “Home Use of Medical Devices Creates New Challenges for FDA, Manufacturers”. These concerns arise especially in light of the growing rate of home health care. That industry will exponentially expand with the aging of the Baby Boomers. In brief, the blog posting describes the lack of standardized review criteria for devices used in these alternate settings. The Medical Devices site is published by the authors of both “The Silver Sheet” and “The Gray Sheet”.
David Harlow’s Health Care Law Blog included a piece, “Organ Procurement in a World Gone Wild”. He details some of the recent scandals that have occurred in transplant medicine, both in the States and abroad. The more interesting component of his discussion are the issues that arise around procurement of organs, a function of the endless list of needy recipients compared to the finite number of donors. As a potential solution to this, he offers an alternative to the current protocol for procuring organs.
September 28, 2007 Related topics: General Management & Administration, Trends