House strikes gift ban in effort to boost business

Reversing course on a new law aimed at diminishing the influence on doctors of pharmaceutical and medical device companies, the House on Wednesday voted to strike the so-called gift ban law, which critics say has hurt commerce in the medical and restaurant industries.

An amendment to preserve the ban attracted 40 votes, with 108 against. The elimination of the gift ban was included in economic development legislation that cleared the House 145-4 and now needs to be reconciled with a Senate bill in a conference committee.

Critics of the ban said it was discouraging out-of-state interests from doing business in Massachusetts and said the ban had not led to demonstrable reductions in health-care costs. Supporters of the ban said the state had already heavily invested itself in implementing it and needed to give the law more time to work itself out. Ban supporters also said other states were pursuing similar bans and predicted the law could help reduce health-care costs and ensure that the interests of patients, not drug and device makers, are the top priority for physicians.

Speaking against the ban were Reps. Garrett Bradley, Brian Dempsey and Barry Finegold. Pushing to preserve the ban were Reps. Alice Wolf, Rut...

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Lawrence General Hospital: A beacon of e-health success

Lawrence General Hospital's Dr. Neil Meehan credits an electronic system, ED PulseCheck, sold by Wakefield-based Picis Inc., with reducing ER wait times by more than 30 minutes. The technology has saved $600,000 this past year in transcription services for dictated ER medical records and brought in $5 million in additional revenue.

See full article at Mass High Tech.
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Do-it-yourself health care can mean savings

In the national debate over health insurance reform, Republicans and Democrats appear to agree on one thing only: the country needs to reduce the cost of health care.

The effort at cheaper care has seen waves of high-tech ideas, from Internet-based medical exams to autonomous robot care devices in the home. But a handful of Boston-area companies and organizations have gotten more traction by applying a mundane principal of e-commerce: pass on tasks and responsibilities to the customer.

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How much is mobile healthcare worth?

  ROI algorithm calculates value of mobile health care

A recent article on Mass High Tech introduced a unique take on calculating value of healthcare dollars spent.

Oriol, who is dean of students at the Harvard Medical School and an obstetric anesthesiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is co-founder of the 17-year-old Family Van mobile health clinic in Boston. While mobile clinic staffers could talk anecdotally about how their programs have profoundly affected the lives of disenfranchised people, they had no hard data to prove how nontraditional programs could provide effective services for hard-to-reach populations and show how much money those services save...

...To prove the effectiveness of a mobile health program such as the Family Van, Oriol and her te...

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Massachusetts Takes Lead in Quest to Digitize Medical Practices

  State helping to shape US efforts to digitize health records for all

According to John Halamka, chief information officer at CareGroup Healthcare System, “The average use of EMRs in the US is between 2 and 20 percent. In Massachusetts, we’re somewhere between 30 and 50 percent, so we’ve had a fair degree of experience with what works and what doesn’t work.’’

Halamka is cochair of a committee that will help Blumenthal determine a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for electronic medical records - essentially, what features do they need in order to be government-certified.

Full Article On Boston.Com: State helping to shape US efforts to digitize health records for all

Massachusetts won influence because Harvard economist David Cutler was the primary architect of candidate Barack Obama’s healthcare plan. “Cutler sort of dreamed up the idea of spending $50 billion or so on healthcare IT as part of Obama’s platform, when Obama wasn...

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