Happy 14th birthday to the Health Business Blog

My main job is president of Health Business Group, a boutique healthcare strategy consulting firm I founded in 2003. As a sideline, I write the Health Business Blog, where I provide a behind the scenes look at the business of healthcare, featuring my spin on healthcare topics in the news, interviews with entrepreneurs, and policy prescriptions.The blog is turning 14 years old this month!  Continuing a tradition I established with birthdays one,  two,  three,  four,  five,  six,  seven,  eight,  nine,  ten,  eleventwelve, and thirteen I have picked out a favorite post from each month. Thanks for continuing to read the blog!March 2018: Tufts Health Plan CEO Tom Croswell on value baed care (podcast)Tufts Health Plan CEO Tom Croswell is a veteran of the health plan world. I sat down with him to discuss value based care, collaboration, diversity and how Tufts tries to set itself apart in a crowded market. Tufts is best known for serving Massachusetts but is also expanding into neighboring states. It has a joint venture in New Hampshire and had just announced its entry into Connecticut in partnership with Hartford HealthCare.April 2018: Ten pharma policy topics in just one article!Kaiser Health News is a non-profit news service that does a great job of exploring healthcare policy topics. Still I was impressed that one article (How a drugmaker turned the abortion pill into a rare-disease profit machinemanaged to directly and indirectly raise at least 10 important policy topics.May 2018: Partners and Harvard Pilgrim aren't really going to merge, are they?The news was full of stories about merger discussions between Partners HealthCare and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. No one denied the reports, so we can assume there was some truth to the rumors. But why would these organizations contemplate a merger and how likely would it be to happen? I compared it to a scene from a Cheech & Chong movie.June 2018: Boston Globe and Boston Herald quote David Williams on Harvard Pilgrim CEO departureA month after Harvard was talking about merging with Partners, the company's CEO was out. It had something to do with his behavior... Both the Globe and Herald wanted to hear what I had to say about departed CEO, Eric Schultz.July 2018: Nurse triage lines 3.0. Podcast with AxisPoint HealthNurse triage lines have gone through three phases of evolution. In phase 1 they were implemented to ‘check the box’  for member education, phase 2 brought “demand management” to keep patients out of the emergency room, and now in phase 3 health plans are creating a gateway to innovative programs and services.I discussed these topics with a leading company in the field.August 2018: John McCain. A healthcare legacyWe don’t normally think of Senator John McCain as a healthcare leader, and yet he played a significant role over the years in various policy matters. CareCentrix CEO, John Driscoll and I paid tribute in a short edition of #CareTalk.

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Interoperability in healthcare 2019: Podcast interview with Rhapsody

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#CareTalk February 2019: Medicare for All?