Four Big Trends

Four relatively little-noticed trends will have profound, positive impacts on health care. Health 2.0 is using the Web to bring patients much better knowledge and data about all aspects of health care. The lawsuit by the advocacy group Consumer Checkbook to get HHS to make Medicare physician data public has the potential to make physician performance profiling easy. Come October, 2008, Medicare and most commercial health plans will stop paying hospitals for avoidable errors like "never-events." And though its slow, we're making steady progress toward the establishment of a national health care "comparative effectiveness" agency.