The "meaningful use" issue has been attracting a lot of attention in healthcare reform efforts lately. In very broad strokes, the debate stems from a provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that allocates funding for physicians who are deemed to be meaningful users of electronic health records by 2011.
A recent article in The Washington Post , headlined “Frequent Fliers’ Add Billions to Hospital Bills,” discusses the frequent flier phenomenon – a condition of our healthcare system that I have been tracking closely for some time.
Recently I attented the Tenth Annual Innovation 2009 Conference in California. One of the issues garnering a lot of attention was the notion that the Obama healthcare reform plan could ultimately wind up creating a government-run insurer.