Tag Archives: red tape
March 21, 2014
March 21, 2014
March 10, 2014
Oregon’s ACA Healthcare Website Failed, Too. But The Reason Why Could Spell Direct Primary Care Success.
The state of Oregon has paid software giant Oracle over $100 million to build a healthcare exchange site. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. And now it appears that Oregon is stuck with Oracle because they can’t hire another firm to finish the job. This is case and point of an old-school IT provider lagging behind the current trends in building massive web operations i.e. the open source approach used on mega-scale websites like Google and Facebook.
March 5, 2014
Flaming Jet Skis, Spacecraft Crashes, Suicide By Jellyfish… And The Attack Of ICD-10
Seriously, ICD-10 billing codes are coming. Unless you untangle yourself from the red tape of bureaucratically controlled healthcare, you are going to need to adjust to this staggering reform. The common way to deal with corporatocratic upgrades is with the classic seminar — and ICD-10 is no different. Thankfully, The Weekly Standard sent a writer to cover one such seminar… Attendees paid between $585 and $985 for a two-day “boot camp” taught by Annie Boynton, with credentials “longer than the alphabet… BS, RHIT, CPCO, CCS…” Students took their seats and found a thin spiral book—the “ICD-10-CD General Code Set Manual” for 2014—and a six-pound “ICD-10 Complete Draft Code Set” that was as thick as a phone book…
March 2, 2014
The Government Proposed 10 Rules For Redesigning Healthcare. And Now Direct Care Is Finally Addressing Them.
In 2001, the government was getting people together in think tanks to re-imagine American healthcare. Coincidentally, at the same time, Dr. Josh Umbehr was envisioning his own solution to a world of rushed visits, stingy insurance reimbursements, and a potential dissatisfaction of a career in medicine. Then in 2010, Dr. Umbehr opened Atlas MD, a medical practice representing his ideals, a place where docs can shrug off the burdens and restrictions of government and insurance regulation and, instead, focus on what their patients need — actual care.
February 18, 2014
A Restaurant In L.A. Just Added Red Tape To Your Check
Republique is a fine dining establishment located in Hancock Park, a Los Angeles neighborhood. Because of Obamacare’s mandate that businesses with 50+ employees provide heatlhcare for ALL employees, they have unveiled an Obamacare “surcharge” tax. Currently, 3% of the untaxed bill is being added to customer tabs to cover the increased cost of their employee healthcare.
February 11, 2014
White House Delays ACA’s Red Tape (With More Red Tape)
We love the smell of Red Tape in the morning. In Washington, The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration announced on Monday that it would “postpone enforcement of a federal requirement for medium-size employers to provide health insurance to employees and allow larger employers more flexibility in how they provide coverage.” Wow, that’s such mouthful we couldn’t bring ourselves to paraphrase it. Let’s break it into smaller parts.
February 7, 2014
17 Game-Changing Health Start-ups (And 5 Brought To You By Red Tape)
Inc.com claims you can find everything you need to know to start and grow your business now. They published a slideshow of 17 promising healthcare startups and we noticed some trends: fitness is big, which makes sense. If we get more people moving, we get fewer people coming in for preventative care — heart attacks, obesity, Type-II diabetes. However, we also noticed how much inspiration for entrepreneurship stemmed from red tape.
Here are some slideshow highlights:
January 14, 2014
Red Tape Wraps Up A Preventative Healthcare Clinic
MDPrevent closed on Dec. 27 2013. The preventive-medical practice was co-founded in Delray Beach, Florida three years ago. It’s premise was that patients would be better off if doctors focused on preventing disease instead of simply treating it. They ran into problems, though, and one of them was red tape. They claim that ultimately the three major healthcare industry players — providers, payers, and patients—all shared some responsibility for their failure, though.
Their experience with bureaucracy was costly. For every dollar they collected, their expenses were three times as much! Their vision was altruistic, and they’d assembled a team that included a health psychologist, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, yoga instructor, health educator, and nurse practitioners. They designed a custom facility that included a teaching kitchen, a gym, and classrooms.
What turned out to be a huge mistake though was basing their business plan on insurance reimbursement rather than cash-only payments. They lost serious money, around $2 million in personal capital. When they saw how expensive operating was, they started cutting costs, trimming staff down to a health psychologist, a registered dietitian, and the founding doctor, who writes, “Medicare reimbursement we received for our services still could not cover our costs. I even abandoned the offices we had built-out and moved to less expensive quarters we shared with an internist. It still made no difference.” He adds, “Most of the third-party insurance companies in the area did not cover our services. Medicare was the exception, but reimbursement was insufficient to cover our costs.”
January 13, 2014
LISTEN: Atlas.md Podcast, Ep. 13
Happy New Year! The direct care duo starts 2014 with good news and exciting updates. We’re happy to report that we’ve been consulted by Kansas University; in the near future, more students will be getting a glimpse into the world of insurance-free medicine through their curriculum. International pins were placed on the I Want Direct Care map (including clinics and patients in the U.K., Vietnam, Argentina, and more). And a humblebrag warning: we were interviewed by Harvard Business Review, so keep an eye out for that.