Fryer's Blog in the Mountains

Do We Really Care About Patients?

It's been three years since I've gotten back into health care.  Our product improves patient outcomes and reduces medical costs.  What we have learned is the vast majority of health care providers (including our own IHC) care more about efficiency of delivery then effectiveness of that delivery.

Sad but true.

So more patients then ever are being over treated, with unnecessary office visits and tests but much more quickly.   And lately it seems that the answer to any problem has one of three choices by the physician:
1) Get this test
2) Take this narcotic prescription
3) Take this anti-depressive drug

Next patient please.

PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or Obama care if you must) seeks to address this by insisting that providers be held responsible after the patient leaves their care and incentives for better outcomes (e.g. doing things that work as opposed to those that are reimbursed).

I am seeing many forward thinking providers and insurance companies who "get it", but we've got a long ways to go.  Healthcare should not be about maximizing revenue per patient at the lowest cost.

CenturyLink / Qwest Dropping VoiP / Broadband Phone: Hello Sprint Connect

I loved my Qwest Broadband phone.  $25 / month for everything.  Then I get a letter last week: "Sorry we're not doing it anymore and you will lose your number the end of December".  What to do?

I looked at Comcast.  $35-$40 / month.  Ummm, no.  Vonage, $26 / month.  Maybe.   Then I saw Sprint Phone Connect.  $20 / month.  It's basically a stationary cell phone into which you can plug in two analogue phones.  And if one of the phones is a base station, you can put them around the house.

Since it has a battery backup, if you lose power, it will still work for a few hours (lose power, no Internet, no VoiP).  However it doesn't have the strong feature set any VoiP phone has, but it does integrate into Google Voice that does have those features.  So we're going to try this out.

I'm still keeping a landline with CenturyLink, but defeaturing options on that line.

Great acquistion strategy there CenturyLink.

UPDATE:  The call quality is subpar on Sprint Connect.  Say a 6 on a scale of 10.
 Tried two different phones so it is the unit.  And I get 5 bars, so that's not the issue.   Sending the unit back and trying Vonage.