Health Wonk Review #10

June 29th, 2006 by Julie Ferguson

Emily Goodson and Jack Mason at HealthNex have done a great job hosting Health Wonk Review #10, which is now up and ready for your perusal. HealthNex, if you are not familiar with it, is a blog ” … by IBMers and Friends on Networked, Patient-Centric Healthcare,” covering such interesting topics as electronic health records, health information exchange, clinical transformation, biobanking, etc.
As with past issues, HWR is a great way to sample the creme de la creme of the health-care policy blogs. The cost of health care is of increasing importance to those of us who are interested in workers comp. When I first began working in this field, medical expenditures were about 45 percent of the claims dollar, and now medical costs represent a whopping 57 percent of total claim costs. Despite this, we don’t have a lot of clout in the overall health-care marketplace. Workers compensation represents a fairly modest part of the health care market – somewhere around 2 percent, according to our friend Joe Paduda. Our collective fate is inextricably linked to the larger health-care market so the trends certainly do bear watching.