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Dentzer named ‘Health Affairs’ editor

You heard it here first, only because I happen to be up way too late on a Friday evening, working on a huge project due in just over two weeks: Susan Dentzer, chief health correspondent for the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” is the new editor-in-chief of Health Affairs, effective May 1.

You heard it here first because the folks at Project HOPE decided to send out the press release well after hours, just as it did a couple of weeks ago when the previous editor, Jamie Robinson, decided to leave after just a few months on the job.

Robinson is returning to his previous job as Kaiser Permanente Distinguished Professor of Health Economics at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He took over at Health Affairs last September, when founding editor John Iglehart retired.

Perhaps I should have taken the hint when Dentzer emceed the Health Affairs 25th anniversary summit last November. Or not. The only other time I had met her was at the 2007 AHIP Institute, when I mistook her for AHIP boss Karen Ignani. I do know that she knows the business, and she was gracious enough to take my call last year and chat for a few minutes, even after telling me that “NewsHour” didn’t have a freelance budget.

According to Health Affairs:

“Dentzer also serves on the Kaiser Commission on the Future of Medicaid and the Uninsured, and she is a member of the national advisory committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research. From 1993 to 2004, Dentzer was a member of the board of trustees for her alma mater, Dartmouth College, and she chaired the board from 2001 through 2004. As a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1986 and 1987, Dentzer studied political economy, health economics, and business at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard School of Public Health.”

That’s quite a CV.

This might be my last post for a while, since my Doctor’s Digest tome, all 30,000 words of it, is due April 14. I may or may not hit the World Health Care Congress in Washington April 21-23, before going on a much-needed vacation on April 26, and I may or may not blog again before then.

March 28, 2008 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

A new gig!

Ladies and Gentlereaders,

I am proud to announce that I have a new gig. I am writing a monthly supplement to the weekly Part B News called Physician Office Technology Report. It’s published by Decision Health of Rockville, Md.

The title pretty much speaks for itself, and the audience is primarily physician practice managers, similar to my last full-time job at a publication that shall remain nameless because I don’t want them to have the publicity.

So yeah, there was a good reason why I was in Philadelphia last week for the Medical Group Management Association‘s annual conference and yet another reason why my blogging has been rather spotty of late.

The first issue of the Part B News Physician Office Technology Report came out this week. Look for it the first week of each month.

Speaking of conferences I’m covering, I will be at the American Medical Informatics Association confab here in Chicago next week. The last time I saw Don Detmer’s crew was in Australia for MedInfo in August. Let’s see, 17 hours of flying vs. 25 minutes on the bus. Discuss.

The AMIA meeting at the Sheraton overlaps with the AHIP Business Forum, which is at the Renaissance Chicago about five blocks away, so it’s unlikely I’ll spend much time with the health insurers.

I did go to the AHIP annual meeting in Las Vegas in June (much warmer than Chicago in November, or, for that matter, Chicago in October 1871), but I’m not sure how much I’d get out of next week’s meeting.

A poll question in an AHIP “SmartBrief” last week asked which of the following trends was most significant in 2007:

1. CMS ruling not to reimburse costs for preventable errors.
2. Expansion of walk-in clinics in retail health settings.
3. Efforts to provide more insurance options for young people.
4. Obesity epidemic continuing.

Notice that health IT didn’t register. It’s not a top-tier issue on the national healthcare scene at the moment, a point further driven home at another event I dropped in on last week: the 25th anniversary celebration for Health Affairs. There, representatives from nine or 10 presidential campaigns participated in a roundtable discussion of healthcare issues.

The way it sounded to me was: “Access. Cost. Access. Cost. Medicare reform. Access. Cost. Health savings accounts. Access. Cost. Access Cost.” John McCain’s representative did mention health IT and, at the very end, Barack Obama’s guy alluded to quality. And you wonder why national HIT legislation hasn’t gone anywhere?

Want another sign that physicians are lagging on the IT front? I’m going to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for some evidence contained in a spam e-mail. Yeah, I know.

Someone trying to sell physician mailing lists said there were 788,974 total licensed physicians in the U.S. That sounds about right. This particular outfit claimed to have e-mail addresses for 17,042 of them. That works out to about 2 percent. Even if you consider only the 600,000 or so practicing docs, you’re only taking about 3 percent.

OK, enough with the spam. Here’s a public service for some people I’ve worked with, either directly or indirectly: Job listings.

First, blogger Matthew Holt is looking for 2-3 unpaid interns for the next health 2.0 conference, scheduled for San Diego next March. He’s based in San Francisco, and I assume most of the work is too. (Maybe I shouldn’t mention that the current issue of another pub I contribute to, Inside Healthcare Computing, has a commentary headlined “Our Take: Health 2.0 Is Really Advertising 2.0.”)

Also, E-Health Media in the UK, publisher of E-Health Insider, is putting on a healthcare IT careers forum in London on Nov. 30.

If you go to the latter, bring me back some British pounds. They’re worth about $2.11 as of this writing. Heck, I’d settle for Canadian or Aussie dollars, euros, yen, whatever.

November 5, 2007 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

Politics and healthcare

Here are just a couple of links for the politically minded.

First off, the Kaiser Family Foundation has put up a site with health-related news about the many, many candidates for president in 2008.

And the Healthcare Update News Service, mostly a compendium of press releases from various companies that also has weekly updates from Health Affairs, has posted video of a March 28 speech by the always-entertaining Bill “Dr. HIPAA” Braithwaite from the Fourth Health Information Technology Summit on privacy and security issues that may hold back health information exchange. I saw the speech live, and I think it’s worth the 33 minutes. Even if you don’t have that much time, you can skip to the “chapters” most of interest, much like watching a DVD.

Quick links:
KFF 2008 politics site
Braithwaite speech on privacy and security issues

July 16, 2007 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.