Quality patient care is at the core of the services provided by
hospitals. Jim Lott tackles end-of-life care, hospital
certification and accreditation, treatment options in behavioral
health and more in his blog.
Jim Lott is the executive vice president of the Hospital
Association of Southern California where he is responsible for
health care policy development, advocacy, and association
communications for hospitals serving Los Angeles, Orange, San
Bernardino, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties.
This will be my last post, as I am leaving HASC at the end of
next month. Health is fine, work is great, just moving on
to the next chapter of my life, which will be in health care…what
else would I do?
I have enjoyed writing this blog, and I thank all of you who have
told me that you like reading what I write. I will truly
miss doing this.
Again, I’m still at HASC until May 31, so drop me a line or
call. After I leave, you may reach me on my cell at
213-324-3262 or by email at JLottSr@me.com.
The use of social media by consumers to both look up as well as
leave performance reviews on the purchases we make and the
services we use is growing exponentially. That use was expanded
last week with the
U.S.Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision to
permit companies to disclose material information to investors,
as long as they have previously alerted investors that they will
be doing so.
Six years ago, I wrote about the emergence of retail clinics as
“…The Next
New Thing” in the delivery of health care. Even then,
for almost 10 years these enterprises had been offering basic
medical care in drug stores in nearly half the states in the
country at about 12 percent of the cost of an emergency room
visit and a third of the cost of a visit to an urgent care
center.At the time, the California Health Care Foundation opined
that, “If successful, this could change the way many people
receive routine, non-urgent medical care, with significant
implication
In my last
blog, I summarized
the plan to move Medicare/Medi-Cal-covered patients residing
in eight California counties into a system of coordinated
care. The move would make California the fifth
dual-eligibles coordinated care project in the nation. In no
particular order, the following demographics about plan enrollees
worry me:
In my January 24th blog post, Taming Medicare’s
Budget Appetite, I mentioned Watson, IBM’s supercomputer
Wellpoint purchased to help medical practitioners make diagnoses
and prescribe treatment plans. Not satisfied with beating the two
top Jeopardy game show champions, Watson has been busy learning
how to be the best doctor on the planet.
I learned what that meant when as a third grader my mother moved
me to a private Catholic school from an economically depressed
inner-city public school where 70 percent of the students never
made it to high school graduation and where the majority of those
who did were sub-literate.
With men outpacing women, almost two-thirds of adults in our
country are overweight, and slightly more than one-in-three are
clinically obese, meaning that they have a body mass index (BMI)
greater than 30. With boys outpacing girls, almost one-in-five of
our children are obese. Clearly, males lag behind females
in maintaining healthy weight profiles. It is also important to
note the positive correlation between low socioeconomic status
and obesity.
A prominent retirement investment planning firm cites two
lifespan statistics in its advertising campaign that, if true,
will stun to death any efforts to rein in the aggregate growth of
what we spend as a nation on health care. “One in three
people born today will live to be 100 years old,” says one
billboard. “The first person who will live to be 150 years
old is alive today,” says another. Thought-provoking ads,
both, and the health care cost implications of such a trend are
breathtaking.
Once a year for the past seven years, our community of hospitals
in Southern California comes together to honor the most giving of
themselves, the laborers of the planet. Okay, so we are a
little biased about the people working in our hospitals. Here are
but five of the extraordinary people we honored last week along
with their stories.
Our first award went to a nurse and social worker on the front
lines of a busy hospital who teamed up to fix a problem that
plagues emergency rooms everywhere … frequent fliers.
California’s Attorney General received over 90 statewide ballot
initiative proposals needing title and summary prior to
circulation for signature gathering to qualify for the November
election. Certainly, not all of them will find their way to the
ballot, 26 being the most ever appearing at one time.
In new health care landscape where inpatient volumes are falling
and Medicare, Medi-Cal and commercial payments to hospitals are
flattening and/or decreasing, radical change and major financial
investment are required by hospitals while facing the most
problematic economic outlook in 20 years.
Rising health insurance premiums are a concern for consumers and
their medical care givers. Both want to preserve access to high
quality, affordable health care. However, empowering a government
agency to decide what health insurance premiums will be, as
proposed by Assembly Bill 52, is the wrong solution to this very
real problem.
Just months after he was first elected California Governor in
1966, Ronald Reagan and the Legislature enacted a radical reform
of the state’s mental health care system. Rather than warehouse
mental health patients indefinitely in state institutions, they
would be treated in their local communities. As it turned out,
the triumph of these so-called reforms was a cut in state funding
for mental health and the closure of publicly-funded hospitals
for the mentally ill in California.
Scientists from all over the world came together earlier this
month and in one powerful voice told us that we human beings
broke our planet. They urged us to stop questioning the existence
of global warming and to begin implementing known and proven
strategies to mitigate the problems that a 4-to-5 point rise in
worldwide climate temperatures in the near-term will cause.
Hopefully, world leaders will listen and begin to do the real
work needed to sustain life on earth.
We need a similar reality check with regard to reforming our
health care delivery system in California and the U.S. Our system
neither provides for the efficient access to health care that 6.5
million uninsured Californians or 47 million uninsured Americans
need, nor is it able to sustain the twice-to-thrice annual health
care cost growth to overall inflation ratio that will soon
cripple our ability to do much about improving access for
anybody.
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s
troublesome.” —Isaac Asimov
Of all the accomplishments achieved by Americans in the past
century, one of the most dazzling has been the prolonging of the
lifespan. In 1900, Americans lived 47 years on average. A healthy
70-year-old today is projected to live to the age of 84.
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not
quite enough time,” once said the late Leonard Bernstein,
renowned composer and orchestra conductor.
California’s emergency medical services (EMS) system is in
critical condition, most industry analysts would agree. In many
parts of the state, hospital emergency department (ED)
overcrowding, patients leaving without being treated, ambulance
diversion, and paramedic downtimes caused by ED saturation have
reached crisis levels.
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