Insulin Nation

MAY 10, 2016

Medicare doesn’t typically provide coverage for continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), as insurors who oversee Medicare coverage have long argued that CGMs are a “precautionary” device rather than a “medically necessary” one. Now, that argument’s premise is facing serious questions in federal court and in the Medicare appeals process. The first case that successfully pushed back against the policy involved Wisconsin resident Jill Whitcomb, who has had Type 1 diabetes for 40 years.

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ACA Times

MAY 11, 2016

In the often-oversimplified world of contractor-based employment, the Affordable Care Act is a blessing in disguise: “employees” can readily obtain health care with the financial burden falling off the “employer.” However, in the case of Uber, this may all change. And the company is not pleased. Last year, Forbes reported that a ruling on behalf of the California Labor Commissioner named Uber drivers as employees of the mobile vehicle enterprise.

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Healthcare Exchange Standards

MAY 11, 2016

For the past year there has been a stalemate that I have tried to control. I think it is time for this stalemate to come to a conclusion. The topic is Patient Privacy Consent; the discussion is if this should be modeled as a core FHIR Resource, or as a core FHIR Profile upon the Contract Resource. The owner of this discussion is the Community Based Collaborative Care (CBCC) workgroup.

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Medicine and Technology

MAY 12, 2016

OK, maybe not quite a Transformer. But, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated how a tiny origami robot can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound. The robot is steered by external magnetic fields.

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Insulin Nation

MAY 9, 2016

Opinion By now, many of you have heard that UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, has opted to restrict choice of insulin pumps for its members to one brand. Because they were able to negotiate a more favorable price, UHC has designated Medtronic as their “preferred provider.” This will make it more difficult and more costly for adults covered by UHC to obtain an insulin pump other than one made by Medtronic.

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Healthcare Exchange Standards

MAY 9, 2016

I have been unfortunate to have been caught in a broad layoff -- Reduction In Force -- at GE Healthcare. GE Healthcare has been my home for just short of 18 years, and I have loved every minute of it. I have been part of many product, either directly on the team or through consulting with them on the use of Interoperability Standards, Privacy, and Security.

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Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health

MAY 9, 2016

Patti Harvey, senior VP, Medicare Clinical Operations and Population Care, and executive director, Care Management Institute, has been a nurse for years, but nothing in her training prepared her for her role as her mother’s caregiver. On Mother’s Day, I will be thinking about the enormous influence my mother had on my life and work. Over the past 10 years, I have felt a strong personal connection to my work as a leader in care delivery at Kaiser Permanente.

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Insulin Nation

MAY 13, 2016

Integrated Diabetes Services (IDS) provides detailed advice and coaching on diabetes management from certified diabetes educators and dieticians. Insulin Nation hosts a regular Q&A column from IDS that answers questions submitted from the Type 1 diabetes community. Q – How do I treat a low without over-correcting for it? A – Everyone with Type 1 diabetes at one time or another has had a bad low, the kind when all you want to do is eat everything in sight.

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ACA Times

MAY 8, 2016

Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act , the goal in mind is to ensure that every American has received or has been given access to adequate health coverage. While many consider this a blessing, others do not welcome the required health coverage. Under the ACA , those who do not have minimum essential health coverage are subject to fees unless exempt from an individual shared responsibility payment.

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Effective collaboration among all care team members is critical to delivering better patient outcomes. A key element to achieving effective collaboration is through the implementation of a clinical communication and collaboration platform. In a fast-paced, high-stress and critical environment, people tend to do whatever gets the job done. Therefore will scramble and use the systems, people, or processes around them to get an outcome more quickly - which can often be at the expense of quality.

Healthcare Exchange Standards

MAY 13, 2016

There is renewed discussion, much like back in January, around the need to go beyond testing just the FHIR Resource 'interoperability'. Testing Interoperability is not easy, and there are struggles with getting this first level testing done right. But this level testing is not complete enough to give confidence that an application, server, intermediary, analytics engine, or other are really ready to be used.

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Insulin Nation

MAY 13, 2016

There are many in the Type 1 community who have created gear to help others with diabetes. From time to time, we will feature snapshots of Type 1-based businesses for our “Type 1 entrepreneurs” series. Erin Murray felt isolated after her diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes seven years ago, as people around her did not seem to understand the challenges that come with the condition.

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Insulin Nation

MAY 13, 2016

Until recently, I wouldn’t let my son, Branden, play soccer because of his Type 1 diabetes. Branden was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of 2, and spent a week in intensive care at the time. When he was 6 years old, we decided to enroll him in a local soccer league, but I soon began to have doubts. I worried about what playing such a physically demanding sport would do to his blood sugar levels, and I envisioned him collapsing on the soccer field.

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Insulin Nation

MAY 10, 2016

Commentary As you probably have heard by now, UnitedHealthcare recently made a veeery unpopular decision with the diabetes community by choosing Medtronic as its preferred supplier of insulin pumps. Reactions came swift and furiously on the diabetes blogosphere , and there have been several coordinated efforts to protest this move. To see how this plays out, it might be helpful to see how the principle players reacted publicly in the initial days of this controversy.

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Ambiq®, a leading developer of ultra-low-power semiconductor solutions that deliver a multifold increase in energy efficiency, introduces HeartKit, its latest addition to neuralSPOT. This optimized AI model enables running various real-time heart monitoring applications to help users and their healthcare providers quickly identify any irregular events to take necessary actions.

Insulin Nation

MAY 9, 2016

I read many stories from the U.S. diabetes community about their ordeals with insurance, and I feel bad for those who have to fight with their insurance companies about these things. As an Australian, these stories feel rather foreign to me (no pun intended). Diabetes management tools are not tied to insurance companies in Australia, and health insurance is not tied to employment.

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ACA Times

MAY 8, 2016

Will consumers make more cost-effective choices of health services and doctors if they are spending their own money? Common sense suggests they would, but researchers have found that consumers don’t always make health care decisions that way. The study was based on a survey of nearly 2,000 Americans who had recently purchased medical services were asked what factors they consider when choosing a doctor or medical service.

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