The Health Care Blog ran a posting entitled “To Change Health Care, Change Diabetes”. The title overreaches, but the argument – that early diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of diabetes would reduce health care costs – is certainly true. The article calls for more measurement of quality, coordination of care, and aggressive treatment.

It is well known […]

Last week I drew a distinction between health plan members and patients. Members are not always patients. In fact, 9% of our members account for 60% of the plan’s medical spending. I argued that a good health plan has a unique opportunity, whether its members are involved with the health care system or not, to […]

From the perspective of a health plan the people we serve are both members who are living their lives and patients interacting with the medical community, periodically or in the case of the chronically ill, constantly. This distinction between members and patients is often missed. Patients are the focus of most of the attention paid […]