Beginning on January 1, 2011, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will require all insurance carriers in the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program to offer standardized, expanded tobacco cessation coverage. This includes full coverage (no enrollee copayments, no coinsurance, no deductibles, and no annual/lifetime dollar limits) for seven FDA-approved medications, four counseling sessionsRead… Read more »
Social Justice: Bringing Light to Our Darkness Ron Manderscheid, PhD Executive Director, NACBHDD As our nights lengthen into fall, darkness has also descended upon our country’s dialogue on National Health Reform. Positions have hardened, and the gulf has widened among our points of view. In this period of uncertainty, it is useful to revisit theRead… Read more »
BEHAVIORAL HEALTHCARE 10-15-10 Keep health reform’s expectations in perspectiveImplementing a century’s worth of vital reforms will take time—it won’t happen overnight by Ron Manderscheid, PhD, Executive Director, NACBHDD This year has been very momentous and tumultuous. Health reforms needed for at least a century have succeeded, and implementation has just started. These reforms are desperatelyRead… Read more »
Thought I would pass this along to you Federal employees: FEHBP database raises privacy concerns By Emily Long 10/05/2010 A new Office of Personnel Management database designed to track federal employee health benefit plans could put at risk the personal information of participants, according to privacy advocates. OPM last week announced plans for a databaseRead… Read more »
We’ve been super busy planning our next LAUNCH sustainability forum. The topic for our second forum is “sustaining human life.” LAUNCH is our incubator program that searches for visionaries, whose world-class ideas, technologies or programs show great promise for making tangible impacts on society. At each LAUNCH forum, ten innovators and 40 thought leaders comeRead… Read more »
Day one of the health care IT track at O’Reilly’s Open Sourceconvention http://oreil.ly/aBl4wN This blog contains a fair amount of news about plans and thetrajectory for HHS’s National Health Information Network and CONNECT,as explained by David Riley and Arien Malec.
My blog on the technology/society web site, O’Reilly Radar: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/07/health-and-human-services-fina.html Summary: Meaningful use requires support for data sharing, patient access, structured formats, and decisionsupport.
I posted pointers to some of these already. Now you can get all five of the O’Reilly Radar interviews with people in government and health care: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/topic/Health The conference is in mid-July, and we will be videotaping all the talks. I’ll report here when I find out where they’ll be posted.
On O’Reilly Radar: Fred Trotter gives a history of open source inhealth IT and explains how open source–and even more, open data–iscrucial: http://oreil.ly/cGXmRq
From Apache to Health and Human Services: Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf discusses the CONNECT health data project Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache Web server project and the CollabNet cooperative software development company, is contracting now with the Department of Health and Human Services on a software project they opened up aRead… Read more »