{"id":387,"date":"2008-10-24T07:10:06","date_gmt":"2008-10-24T12:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pmedicine.org\/epatients\/?p=387"},"modified":"2008-10-24T07:12:03","modified_gmt":"2008-10-24T12:12:03","slug":"how-to-take-american-health-care-from-worst-to-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/participatorymedicine.org\/epatients\/2008\/10\/how-to-take-american-health-care-from-worst-to-first.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;How to Take American Health Care From Worst to First&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What do we think of THIS??  An <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/10\/24\/opinion\/24beane.html\" target=\"_blank\">op-ed piece<\/a> in the NY Times:<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Billy_Beane\" target=\"_blank\">Billy Beane<\/a>, GM of the Oakland Athletics, suggests using baseball-style number-crunching to improve healthcare, with Newt Gingrich and John Kerry co-authoring the piece. Some snips:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Remarkably, a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Franchises have used this data to answer some of the key questions in baseball: When is an attempted steal worth the risk? Whom should we draft, and in what order? Should we re-sign an aging star player and run the risk of paying for past performance rather than future results?<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Similarly, a health care system that is driven by robust comparative clinical evidence will save lives and money. &#8230;&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more-->In my day job I do deep-dive statistical analysis of traffic to my employer&#8217;s web site. When we find an outreach method that works, we keep doing it; when we find something that doesn&#8217;t, we stop.  Print advertising is dying (killing print publications) because it&#8217;s almost impossible for advertisers to identify how many people see an ad.<\/p>\n<p>When my company uses print, we provide a real incentive offer and a link to a unique web page so we can see how many people show up \u2013 how effective the &#8220;treatment&#8221; was.  Most advertisers don&#8217;t: they just &#8220;spend and pray.&#8221; And this Beane-Newt-Kerry column suggests that healthcare (at least US healthcare) is pretty similar. Little or no simple tracking of what works.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, there&#8217;s plenty of data from overseas about what does work: having a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncqa.org\/tabid\/631\/Default.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">patient-centered medical home<\/a>, with more primary care and <em>less<\/em> use of specialists.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do we think of THIS?? 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