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B.C. had to move on, minister says of federal health care deal

B.C. had to move on, minister says of federal health care deal
'It became increasingly clear that this is what Ottawa was going to offer,' says B.C health minister

CBC News Posted: Feb 20, 2017 9:31 AM PT Last Updated: Feb 20, 2017 10:24 AM PT

British Columbia signed a 10-year, bilateral health care deal with the federal government on Friday, Feb. 17 which includes over $1 billion for home care and mental health. (CBC News )

Health Minister Terry Lake defends health care deal8:08

B.C. federal health care deal short on funding, critic says7:07

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British Columbia's Health Minister Terry Lake says the province's decision to sign a bilateral health care deal with Ottawa is the best it can do given the federal government's tough negotiating stance.

On Friday, B.C. signed a 10-year health care deal with over $1 billion dollars targeted to home care and mental-health initiatives. In a separate announcement, the federal government also put forward $10 million to help B.C. fight the opioid crisis.

Before the deal was signed B.C. was one of several of provinces including Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba holding out for a better deal on the level of annual funding.

"It became increasingly clear that this is what Ottawa was going to offer," Lake said on CBC's The Early Edition.

"My conversations with Ontario in particular reinforced the feeling that we were certainly getting from Ottawa that there was no more money to be offered and at some point, we had to move on."

Federal Minister of Health Jane Philpott, left, and British Columbia Health Minister Terry Lake. With British Columbia signing a health care deal, only Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Alberta remain outside of the deal offered by the federal government. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press)

Lake, who described Ottawa as a "tough negotiator", said the targeted money will help British Columbia continue its efforts to make a more efficient healthcare system.

"We have made great efforts to move the system away from the acute care system so we can support people in home and community. That will reduce our costs over time," he said. "So with this targeted funding in home care, in mental health, in substance abuse supports, we can catch people before they tip over the edge."
Less than we need?

While the B.C. Health Coalition coordinator Terrie Hendrickson was pleased more money was going to home care, mental health and the opioid crisis, she said the funding deal fell short billions of dollars.

"The B.C. government is getting less than we actually need to just maintain our services — never mind improve our services in areas that we need to improve it in," she said.

She was particularly critical of the yearly percentage increases agreed to in the deal. The provincial government will receive 4.4 per cent by year three of the agreement, instead of the original 5.2 per cent it sought.

"All of the information that we have shows that the health care system needs at least an annual increase of 5.2 per cent and that's just to maintain the current system that we have now," she said.

Terry Lake defended the numbers by saying it was "certainly better" than the three per cent base initially offered by the federal government.

"Of course I would have like to have more money. There's no question about it," he said.

"It is what it is and we have to go forward because we've got to get programming on the ground to address the needs of British Columbians."

Impinj and STANLEY Healthcare Announce Partnership and Platform Integration

ORLANDO, Fla. and SEATTLE, Feb. 20, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Impinj (PI), a leading provider of RAIN RFID solutions for identifying, locating and authenticating everyday items, today announced a partnership with STANLEY Healthcare, a market-leading provider of visibility solutions and analytics for the healthcare industry. As a result of this partnership, STANLEY Healthcare will integrate the Impinj Platform with the MobileView® Real-Time Location System (RTLS) software platform, and offer the Impinj-STANLEY Healthcare solution as part of its extensive portfolio.

“Today’s healthcare leaders are under increasing pressure to provide excellent and efficient patient care,” said Impinj Global Healthcare Lead Sandy Murti. “We’re excited to partner with a market leader like STANLEY Healthcare to enable health-delivery organizations with innovative RAIN RFID solutions for real-time asset tracking and patient workflow management.”

The partnership includes integrating key components of the Impinj Platform – Impinj’s Monza R6 endpoint ICs, xArray and xSpan RAIN RFID gateways and ItemSense operating-system software – to deliver new capabilities in asset tracking and patient flow to customers of STANLEY Healthcare. The partnership and integration enables STANLEY Healthcare’s customers to easily deploy the Impinj Platform to improve efficiency and accuracy of patient care and management.

“Improving the efficiency of patient care is a priority for our healthcare customers,” said Gabi Daniely, Vice President of Solutions, Products and Marketing for STANLEY Healthcare. “The integration with Impinj’s Platform expands the breadth of capabilities we can deliver via our MobileView platform for our customers.”

Visit Impinj at HIMSS
Learn more about the partnership between Impinj and STANLEY Healthcare or the Impinj Platform at HIMSS 2017 in Orlando, Florida on February 20-22, 2017 in Booth 8361, Hall E, Intelligent Health Pavilion. Schedule an appointment here.

About STANLEY Healthcare
STANLEY Healthcare provides over 5,000 acute care hospitals and 12,000 long-term care organizations with enterprise solutions that transform safety, security and operational efficiency. The STANLEY Healthcare solution set enables customers to achieve organizational excellence and superior care in five critical areas: Patient Safety, Security & Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Clinical Operations & Workflow and Supply Chain & Asset Management. These solutions are complemented by consulting, training, implementation and integration services. STANLEY Healthcare is proud to be part of Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. For more information, visit stanleyhealthcare.com. Follow STANLEY Healthcare on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

About Impinj
Impinj, Inc. (PI) is a leading provider of RAIN RFID solutions. The Impinj Platform connects billions of everyday items such as apparel, medical supplies, automobile parts, drivers’ licenses, food and luggage to applications such as inventory management, patient safety, asset tracking and item authentication, delivering real-time information to businesses about items they create, manage, transport and sell. The Impinj Platform wirelessly delivers information about these items’ unique identity, location and authenticity, or Item Intelligence™, to the digital world, which Impinj believes is the essence of the Internet of Things. For more information, visit

UK wearable healthcare startup wins £1m NHS contract

Edinburgh healthcare technology startup snap40 has won a £1m contract from NHS England to further develop what is claimed to be a “game-changing” wearable monitoring device.

The funding, awarded through the Small Business Research Initiative for Healthcare (SBRI), will be used to scale the technology and provide critical validation funding for two clinical studies with NHS Fife and with NHS Lothian’s Emergency Medicine Research Group Edinburgh (EMERGE).

The company’s technology consists of a single medical wearable device, worn on the upper arm, that continuously monitors respiratory rate, heart rate, relative change in systolic blood pressure, oxygen saturations, skin temperature and movement.

Data gathered by the device is transmitted continuously to a predictive analytics software platform – underpinned by a set of proprietary machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms – that analyses a user’s vital signs for changes and indication of risk. If the system determines that the wearer is in danger it will provide an alert to clinical staff.

snap40 CEO Christopher McCann said that the technology could help ease the burden on the UK’s beleaguered health service. “Access to doctors and nurses is at a premium. Our society simply cannot afford one-to-one care – snap40 changes that. It allows our world-class healthcare staff to care for many more patients by helping them to prioritise who needs attention most.”

Karen Livingstone, national director SBRI Healthcare, agreed that technologies like snap40 will become increasingly important in the future: “People are increasingly taking control of their own health, using tools to inform their behaviours and decisions,” she said. “Artificial intelligence technology is becoming more and more powerful, and will play an increasing role in healthcare over the coming years.”

The SBRI contract will enable the company to expand its engineering team, and help it move towards its goal of getting regulatory clearance in Europe and the US.

New Facilities Augment Healthcare Access

Inequitable geographical distribution of health facilities pose major challenges to achieving health targets set in the national development goals. To address the problem, a considerable number of health centers and health houses (which provide basic health services to people) were opened simultaneously across the country on Monday.

Nearly 657 health centers were inaugurated by 47 universities of medical sciences in 28 provinces through a video conference held in the presence of Health Minister Seyed Hassan Qazizadeh Hashemi, at a health center in the northern Mazandaran Province.

“On Tuesday the health minister will visit the six newly-opened health centers in Zeyt-e- Sofla, Tabaqdeh, and Panbeh Chooleh villages and cities of Izadshahr, Noor, and Juyabr, all in Mazandaran,” said Qasem Janbabaee, head of Mazandaran University of Medical sciences.

“Since 2013, six chemotherapy treatment centers and four cancer diagnosis centers have opened in the province,” which has a high incidence of esophageal cancer, he added.

Although people living in less populated cities and villages still don’t have acceptable access to specialized healthcare services, the latest measure significantly improves their access to quality basic healthcare. Currently, most of the specialists sent to deprived areas are active in the fields of internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology.

Funds allocated for construction of the new health facilities with a total area of 200,000 sq meters was about $70 million, IRNA reported.

With the establishment of the new centers there is at least one basic health center for every 8,000 rural people now. Also, there is a dentist and a laboratory technician for every 15,000 rural population.

Since the 2014 Health Reform Plan, more than 2,700 health centers were established across the country at a cost of $195 million (7,800 billion rials). Around $183 million (7,350 billion rials) was also spent by the Health Ministry on reconstruction and renovation of 12,780 existing health centers.

More Centers Soon

An additional 6,200 health centers in towns with a population of less than 20,000 people will be established in the near future.

Earlier, a MoU was signed between Hashemi and Abbas Akhoundi, the minister of roads and urban development, to expand the number of health centers in urban and rural areas so as to cover more people living in outlying areas of cities and towns.

With the aim to curb critical shortage in the health workforce in deprived areas, last November the ministry dispensed 2,000 specialists in different fields across 850 state-run hospitals in 378 cities. An estimated 1,600 more specialists are expected to start work in deprived areas soon. The measure will improve equal access to healthcare services in different parts of the country, “at least for a specific period of time since doctors return to their original place of work after completion of field services,” said Mohammad Aghajani, deputy minister of health for treatment.

U.S. healthcare costs to escalate over next decade: government agency

A doctor holds the hand of a patient in a hospital emergency room in Peoria, Illinois, November 26, 2013. REUTERS/Jim Young

The cost of medical care in the United States is expected to grow at a faster clip over the next decade and overall health spending growth will outpace that of the gross domestic product, a U.S. government health agency said on Wednesday.

A report by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) cited the aging of the enormous baby boom generation and overall economic inflation as prime contributors to the projected increase in healthcare spending.

Overall healthcare spending will comprise 19.9 percent of the economy in 2025, up from 17.8 percent in 2015, the report forecast. The pace of growth in U.S. spending on health is expected to pick up in 2017, increasing 5.4 percent over 2016. That compares with an estimated 4.8 percent spending uptick in 2016. Spending for 2016 was estimated at $3.4 trillion.

When the final numbers are in, the growth in prescription drug spending for 2016 is expected to have slowed to 5 percent from 9 percent in 2015. However, CMS has forecast growth of 6.4 percent per year between 2017 and 2025, in part because of spending on expensive newer specialty drugs, such as for cancer and multiple sclerosis.

The projections for 2016 to 2025 were made assuming that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), former President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law widely known as Obamacare, would remain intact. It does not take into account likely changes to the law.

The Republican-led Congress and President Donald Trump have vowed to repeal and replace the ACA, but a viable replacement plan has yet to emerge.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office last month to freeze regulations and enable government agencies to take other steps to weaken Obamacare.

The ACA expanded Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, in more than 30 states and set up private healthcare exchanges that enabled previously uninsured people to buy health insurance. After high enrollment between 2014 and 2015, Medicaid and private health insurance spending were expected to have slowed in 2016.

But spending on Medicare, the government health insurance program for the elderly, is expected to grow between 2017 and 2025 as a larger elderly population requires more medical services.

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The overall insured rate of the population is expected to reach 91.5 percent in 2025, up from 90.9 percent in 2015, the report said.

U.S. health care needs a wakeup call from India: Column

Global innovators are doing high-quality $1,800 heart surgery. Why aren't we paying attention?

In Bangalore, India, heart surgeons perform daily state-of-the-art heart surgery on adults and children at an average cost of $1,800. For the record, that’s about 2% of the $90,000 that the average heart surgery costs in the United States. And when it comes to the quality of the heart surgery, the patient outcomes are among the best in the world.

I visited India during Thanksgiving week to meet with Dr. Devi Shetty. He’s the heart surgeon who served as personal physician to Mother Teresa and now runs Narayana Health, with 20 hospitals in India. I wanted see what the United States could learn from medical innovations undertaken halfway around the world, and how he achieves these impressive clinical results at such a low price.

The high quality and low cost represent the type of disruptive innovation that has impacted nearly all industries in the United States, and should serve as a wake-up call for American doctors and hospitals. Disruption is what we call it when lower-priced alternatives to current products and services are introduced. Each time, the incumbents in the field scoff at them and dismiss their long-term impact, only to be blindsided when after a decade these companies dominate.

Ask most Americans about obtaining their health care outside of the United States, and they respond with disdain and negativity. In their mind, the quality and medical expertise available elsewhere is second-rate. Of course, that's exactly what Yellow Cab thought about Uber, Kodak thought about digital photography, General Motorsthought about Toyota and Borders thought about Amazon.

To date, doctors and hospitals have been spared the pain of disruption. But that day is ending, and I predict that even people looking for it to happen are gazing in the wrong direction. They expect disruption to be led by companies like Google and Apple or maybe entrepreneurial start-ups. Based on my time in India, they should be looking globally.

Trump is keeping too much of Obamacare: Christian Schneider

Let states lead on replacing Obamacare: Column

Most families in India have no health insurance, and often need to borrow the money to pay for surgery. When it costs $1,800 for heart surgery, Shetty can offer it to only so many children. But if it costs less, he can save more lives. He and the people working in his hospitals are driven to transform health care to save lives.

The day I was there, the teams of surgeons performed 37 heart surgeries on adults and children, including one heart transplant. That translates into about 900 procedures a month, or about what most U.S. university hospitals do a year. His success results from a combination of high volume, advanced technology and a focus on people and performance.

In surgery, the experience of the surgeon and the team are the best predictors of superior clinical outcomes. As you might imagine, given the huge volume of procedures his team performs each day, his hospital’s results are exceptional. And contrary to what Americans may assume, the entire surgical experience is cutting edge, and beyond what is available almost anywhere in the United States.

For example, clinicians use a sophisticated electronic health record they developed, with the information stored on an iPad. Unlike nearly all U.S. EHR systems, the application is so intuitive that minimal physician or nurse training is required. The operating rooms themselves have huge windows leading to protected gardens designed to allow natural sunlight to enter and spur creativity.

The bedside monitoring equipment links with a central computer system, allowing clinical leaders like Devi to measure each day how long it took a physician to intervene for a potentially urgent medical problem. In the United States this often exceeds an hour at night and on the weekend. In India it was eight minutes. The disruptive innovation he has implemented isn’t just lower cost, it's also higher quality.

The hospital's focus on people was widely evident. Embroidered on the white coats of doctors, nurses and staff was the question, "How can I help you?"

Its research facility matched the best university hospitals, with tens of thousands of fully sequenced DNA specimens, and a place to store cancer tissue from today, to be tested against the discoveries of tomorrow. Unlike many in the U.S., it was fully integrated with clinical practice, focusing on the questions and opportunities raised by the treating physicians. Next door was the lab focused on nanotechnology, and down the hall, one working on a vaccine to prevent heart attacks.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Obamacare costs way more than it should: Column

Devi took me to Biocon, a drug manufacturing company with its visionary chairman and managing director, Dr. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. The manufacturing machines were identical to those used by companies in the U.S. and the cleanliness matched the best in the world. The company’s products were some of the most sophisticated in medicine, including biosimilar drugs for the treatment of cancer, inflammation and arthritis. But one stood out in particular, and that was insulin.

The medication had identical action to what's sold in the U.S. And its preloaded syringes, with a sophisticated calibrating mechanism, were more accurate in dose than any I've seen. What was most remarkable was the price — less than 10% of what it costs Americans with diabetes today. The combination of massive scale and appropriate pricing accounted for the 10-fold difference.

The U.S. can continue for a few more years to provide inefficient medical care and tolerate exorbitantly priced drugs. But at some point, insurance companies will start offering patients and their families all-expense-paid trips around the globe, and maybe even $5,000 to use in the duty-free shop after their surgery and medical treatment are complete.

Most American doctors and hospitals see India as far away, and as a result, underestimate the dangers they face from global disruption. They assume that people won’t be willing to travel halfway around the world for surgery. And they may be right. But before they become too complacent, they should look to the Grand Cayman Island, with its seven-mile white sand beach and tourist culture. There Shetty is building a 2,000 bed hospital for a population of more than 50,000 citizens. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that by airplane Florida is less than an hour away.

Robert Pearl is CEO of The Permanente Medical Group and a clinical professor of surgery at Stanford University.

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by Taboola

Global innovators are doing high-quality $1,800 heart surgery. Why aren't we paying attention?

Trump is keeping too much of Obamacare: Christian Schneider

Let states lead on replacing Obamacare: Column

The hospital's focus on people was widely evident. Embroidered on the white coats of doctors, nurses and staff was the question, "How can I help you?"

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Obamacare costs way more than it should: Column

Robert Pearl is CEO of The Permanente Medical Group and a clinical professor of surgery at Stanford University.