| Industry | Healthcare |
|---|---|
| Predecessor | Health Systems Incorporated |
| Founded | 1975 in Boise, Idaho |
| Founder | Don Kemper |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Area served | United States |
Key people |
|
| Revenue | US$ 39,000,000 [1] (2015) |
Number of employees | 270 [1] |
| Website | healthwise |
Healthwise is a non-profit company founded in 1975 that develops health content and patient education for the health insurance companies, care management companies, hospitals, and consumer health web sites.
Healthwise was founded in Boise, Idaho, in 1975 by Don Kemper, based on his previous work at Health Systems Incorporated (HSI), a project of the National Center for Health Services Research. [2] [3] In 2014, the Informed Medical Decisions Foundation was taken over by Healthwise and became a subsidiary. [1] In 2016, Kemper retired from Healthwise and Bob Kyte took over as CEO. [1] In Fall of 2018, Healthwise named then Chief Medical Officer Dr. Adam Husney as CEO. [4]
In the beginning, Healthwise offered printed decision-support and self-care materials for patients. It also publishes the Healthwise Handbook, a handbook with plain-language information and prevention tips on 190 common health problems, which is periodically updated and contains physician-approved guidelines on if and when to call a doctor for the problems it covers. [2] [5] The guidebook was distributed for free with the help of a $2.1m grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to 125,000 households in Idaho; as a result, 39% of recipients reported that the handbook helped them avoid a visit to a doctor. [5] Additionally, according to the Blue Cross of Idaho visits to the emergency room by owners of the guide went down by 18%. [5]
Parts of the HealthwiseHandbook were replicated in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa; in British Columbia, the handbook was distributed to all households. [5] The handbook was also translated into Spanish and a specialized version for older adults has been released as well. [5]
According to a study by the Partners Health Initiative in Anderson, South Carolina, which had supplied 154,000 families with Healthwise information, 23% reported that it saved them an unnecessary trip to the doctor and 13% reported that it prevented an unnecessary trip to the emergency room, with underinsured and uninsured families being the most avid users. [6]
In the mid-1990s, the company created an online resource for health information, the Healthwise Knowledgebase. [7] The Knowledgebase features interactive health content and decision support tools and Healthwise requires that all content is evidence-based and reviewed by experts before publication. [3] Content of the Knowledgebase is used for self-diagnostic services such as WebMD as well as websites of hospitals and health-plan providers. [2]
{{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)In the United States, a health maintenance organization (HMO) is a medical insurance group that provides health services for a fixed annual fee. It is an organization that provides or arranges managed care for health insurance, self-funded health care benefit plans, individuals, and other entities, acting as a liaison with health care providers on a prepaid basis. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 required employers with 25 or more employees to offer federally certified HMO options if the employer offers traditional healthcare options. Unlike traditional indemnity insurance, an HMO covers care rendered by those doctors and other professionals who have agreed by contract to treat patients in accordance with the HMO's guidelines and restrictions in exchange for a steady stream of customers. HMOs cover emergency care regardless of the health care provider's contracted status.
A patient's bill of rights is a list of guarantees for those receiving medical care. It may take the form of a law or a non-binding declaration. Typically a patient's bill of rights guarantees patients information, fair treatment, and autonomy over medical decisions, among other rights.
Primary care is the day-to-day healthcare given by a health care provider. Typically this provider acts as the first contact and principal point of continuing care for patients within a healthcare system, and coordinates other specialist care that the patient may need. Patients commonly receive primary care from professionals such as a primary care physician, a chiropractor,a physician assistant, a physical therapist, or a nurse practitioner. In some localities, such a professional may be a registered nurse, a pharmacist, a clinical officer, or an Ayurvedic or other traditional medicine professional. Depending on the nature of the health condition, patients may then be referred for secondary or tertiary care.
Terminal illness or end-stage disease is a disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated and is expected to result in the death of the patient. This term is more commonly used for progressive diseases such as cancer, dementia or advanced heart disease than for injury. In popular use, it indicates a disease that will progress until death with near absolute certainty, regardless of treatment. A patient who has such an illness may be referred to as a terminal patient, terminally ill or simply as being terminal. There is no standardized life expectancy for a patient to be considered terminal, although it is generally months or less. Life expectancy for terminal patients is a rough estimate given by the physician based on previous data and does not always reflect true longevity. An illness which is lifelong but not fatal is a chronic condition.
The term managed care or managed healthcare is used in the United States to describe a group of activities intended to reduce the cost of providing health care and providing American health insurance while improving the quality of that care. It has become the predominant system of delivering and receiving American health care since its implementation in the early 1980s, and has been largely unaffected by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
...intended to reduce unnecessary health care costs through a variety of mechanisms, including: economic incentives for physicians and patients to select less costly forms of care; programs for reviewing the medical necessity of specific services; increased beneficiary cost sharing; controls on inpatient admissions and lengths of stay; the establishment of cost-sharing incentives for outpatient surgery; selective contracting with health care providers; and the intensive management of high-cost health care cases. The programs may be provided in a variety of settings, such as Health Maintenance Organizations and Preferred Provider Organizations.
Information Therapy was first cited in the literature to mean “information leading patients in the direction of discovering more about their disease.” Later, the term was modified to mean “the therapeutic provision of information to people for the amelioration of physical and mental health and wellbeing,” that could lead to a decrease in the utilization of healthcare resources.
Utilization management (UM) or utilization review is the use of managed care techniques such as prior authorization that allow payers, particularly health insurance companies, to manage the cost of health care benefits by assessing its appropriateness before it is provided using evidence-based criteria or guidelines.
America's Poison Centers is a national nonprofit organization founded in 1958 that represents the nation's 55 poison centers. America's Poison Centers supports Poison Centers in their public health mission to prevent poisonings, provide education, conduct scientific research and treat individuals exposed to poisoning from medications, environmental events, plants, animals, and household products or toxins. America's Poison Centers also supports the efforts of poison centers and interested individuals to reduce morbidity and mortality from unintentional poisonings. America's Poison Centers sets standards for Poison Center operations and certifies specialists in poison information who are available 24/7 to respond to public, health-care provider and emergency medical service personnel requests for assistance. In addition, America's Poison Centers maintains the National Poison Data System (NPDS), the only near real-time poison information and surveillance database in the United States.
Medical diagnosis is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being implicit. The information required for diagnosis is typically collected from a history and physical examination of the person seeking medical care. Often, one or more diagnostic procedures, such as medical tests, are also done during the process. Sometimes the posthumous diagnosis is considered a kind of medical diagnosis.
In economics, supplier induced demand (SID) may occur when asymmetry of information exists between supplier and consumer. The supplier can use superior information to encourage an individual to demand a greater quantity of the good or service they supply than the Pareto efficient level, should asymmetric information not exist. The result of this is a welfare loss.
Elevance Health, Inc. is an American health insurance provider. Prior to June 2022, Elevance Health was named Anthem, Inc. The company's services include medical, pharmaceutical, dental, behavioral health, long-term care, and disability plans through affiliated companies such as Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Empire BlueCross BlueShield in New York State, Anthem Blue Cross in California, Wellpoint, and Carelon. It is the largest for-profit managed health care company in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. As of 2022, the company had 46.8 million members within its affiliated companies' health plans.
Unnecessary health care is health care provided with a higher volume or cost than is appropriate. In the United States, where health care costs are the highest as a percentage of GDP, overuse was the predominant factor in its expense, accounting for about a third of its health care spending in 2012.
Healthgrades Operating Company Inc., known as Healthgrades, is a US company that provides information about physicians, hospitals, and healthcare providers. Healthgrades has amassed information on over three million U.S. health care providers. The company was founded by Kerry Hicks, David Hicks, Peter Fatianow, John Neal, and Sarah Lochran, and is based in Denver, Colorado. Rob Draughon serves as the company's CEO. According to USA Today, Healthgrades is the first comprehensive physician rating and comparison database. The application is part of a trend in health technology in the United States towards consumer-driven healthcare.
Balance billing, sometimes called surprise billing, is a medical bill from a healthcare provider billing a patient for the difference between the total cost of services being charged and the amount the insurance pays. It is a pervasive problem in the United States with providers who are out of network, and therefore not subject to the rates or terms of providers who are in-network. Balance billing has a variable prevalence by market and specialty.
Choosing Wisely is a United States-based health educational campaign, led by the ABIM Foundation, about unnecessary health care.
NHS Pathways is a triage software utilised by the National Health Service of England to triage public telephone calls for medical care and emergency medical services – such as 999 or 111 calls – in some NHS trusts and five of the ambulance services in the country. In its emergency capacity, it has replaced the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System for some trusts, and in non-emergency telephone triage it is found in many medical care triage systems, such as NHS 111.
Whitecoat Health Service Directory, commonly referred to as Whitecoat, is an online directory of healthcare professionals. It was launched in Australia in 2013 and New Zealand in 2018. The service allows consumers to rate their experience of a healthcare provider and read other users’ recommendations and reviews. By 2016, Whitecoat was the largest website of its kind in Australia. Whitecoat has drawn significant criticism from professional medical bodies.
DaVita Inc. provides kidney dialysis services through a network of 2,816 outpatient dialysis centers in the United States, serving 204,200 patients, and 321 outpatient dialysis centers in 10 other countries serving 3,200 patients. The company primarily treats end-stage renal disease (ESRD), which requires patients to undergo dialysis 3 times per week for the rest of their lives unless they receive a donor kidney. The company has a 37% market share in the U.S. dialysis market. It is organized in Delaware and based in Denver.
Press Ganey Associates is a South Bend, Indiana-based health care company known for developing and distributing patient satisfaction surveys. As of January 2017, its Medical Practice Survey was the most widely used outpatient satisfaction survey in the United States.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hospitals became severe for some hospital systems of the United States in the spring of 2020, a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Some had started to run out of beds, along with having shortages of nurses and doctors. By November 2020, with 13 million cases so far, hospitals throughout the country had been overwhelmed with record numbers of COVID-19 patients. Nursing students had to fill in on an emergency basis, and field hospitals were set up to handle the overflow.
