Why shopping for healthcare doesn't work

Austin Frakt says in his blog and NYT:

Each year, for well over a decade, more people have faced higher health insurance deductibles. The theory goes like this: The more of your own money that you have to spend on health care, the more careful you will be — buying only necessary care, purging waste from the system.

But that theory doesn’t fully mesh with reality: High deductibles aren’t working as intendedHe refers specifically to this NBER paper and the summary is :

We could provide physicians with price, quality and distance information for the services they recommend. Further, with financial bonuses, we could give physicians (instead of, or in addition to, patients) some incentive to identify and suggest lower-cost care. An alternative approach is for insurers to refuse to pay more than a reasonable price — like the market-average — for a health care service, though patients could pay the difference if they prefer a higher-priced provider.
Leaving decisions solely to patients, and just making them spend more of their own money, doesn’t work.

I you want to understand why shopping for healthcare doesn't work, have a look at this book:

Talent in healthcare

Talent Management in Healthcare Exploring How the World’s Health Service Organisations Attract,
Manage and Develop Talent

I've always thought that we devote too few efforts to understand current talent in health care and the ways for improving it. And a new book on this topic is really welcome. If you have a look at the index you'll be convinced that these are the issues to take into consideration:

1  No Health Service Without a Health Workforce
2 The Changing Landscape of Healthcare
3 Defining Talent in the Health Sector
4 The Boundaries of Talent Management
5 The Talent Management Evolution Matrix
6 Talent Strategy: Alignment and Integration
7 Succession Planning and Leadership Development
8 Whole Workforce Development
9 Attraction, Recruitment and Resourcing of Talent
10 Talent Management and Employee Engagement
11 Retaining Talent in Health Sector Organisations
12 The Role of the Board, the Executive Team, Line Managers and HR Professionals in Talent Management
13 Twenty Important Conclusions About Talent Management in the Health Sector

At least UK is really trying to define a new model, and the Topol Review summarises the whole effort. I suggest a close look at it. You'll find the interim report here.

Machine learning in Medicine

Machine Learning and Evidence-Based Medicine

While waiting for the new book by Eric Topol: Deep Medicine, let's have a look at this article, and at this summary table:

 Xavier Miserachs