lose thirty-eight thousand pounds
Grim
Cth DoH look to disinvestment in low value care
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/health/health-eyes-15bn-payoff-from-war-on-waste/story-fn59nokw-1227183948925
Health eyes $15bn payoff from war on waste
EXCLUSIVE – SEAN PARNELL – HEALTH EDITOR
Ten per cent of all health expenditure — as much as $15 billion a year — could be saved through a concerted effort to reduce wasteful programs, marginal treatments and avoidable errors, senior officials in the Department of Health have revealed. The department’s Strategic Policy Group was examining large-scale savings — including an evidence-based campaign of “disinvestment” in low-value programs, drugs and therapies — long before the Abbott government committed to its unpopular GP co-payment.
Documents obtained by The Australian under Freedom of Information laws show the group of deputy secretaries and other officials wanted to reduce spending on low-value interventions and get serious about combating avoidable side-effects, mistakes and infections.
“Members expressed strong interest in holding further discussions on the impact of waste and adverse events,’’ minutes from a November 2013 meeting state. “The discussions could be informed by work already under way in the department on disinvestment and by ongoing work by the Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Health Care.”
Out of the public eye, the group — which reports directly to the secretary of the department — established an Optimising Value in Health Investment Working Group and talked with Treasury officials. The bureaucrats were keen to redirect money away from areas where there was minimal benefit and potential harm. The FOI documents shed new light on the workings of government and go some way to dispelling the myth that health bureaucrats have not recognised the need to pursue efficiencies and efficacy.
A department spokeswoman yesterday confirmed the work was ongoing. The Grattan Institute has called for more work to be done on the cost of hospital admissions and procedures, noting the cost of a hip replacement in NSW public hospitals varies by more than $16,000. It has estimated savings of $1bn a year from targeting such inefficiencies, as well as $500 million a year from workforce reform — making better use of highly skilled workers — and up to $500m a year through greater use of generic medicines. Some in government believe higher co-payments for drugs and services will make consumers spend less on unproven therapies and, with more of a financial stake in health, be more accepting of limits on access and subsidies.
There are questions about the cost of subsidising new and expensive drugs, especially those with few recipients and limited efficacy, with a Senate committee soon to report on the timing and affordability of access to cancer drugs.
The last federal budget committed to a controversial co-payment that has since been reworked. It also outlined plans to merge the safety and quality commission and five other agencies into a new Health Productivity and Performance Commission — a move that has already halted work on new performance reporting for emergency departments, elective surgery and infections — and replace Medicare Locals with a new primary care structure.
The budget did not take up the commission of audit’s recommendation for a broader, 12-month review of health policies and programs. The government has yet to finalise outstanding reviews into mental health, alcohol and drug services, after-hours GP services, super clinics and unproven natural therapies benefiting from the health insurance rebate. The government believed the health architecture established by Labor needed to be disassembled, price signals put in place for consumers, and growth opportunities given to the private sector before other savings could be pursued. Plans for a reworked $5 copayment — estimated to save $3.5bn by 2017-18 — will start to play out from Monday, when regulations setting new time frames for consultations come into effect.
The government wants GPs to focus on more serious cases, requiring longer consultations, but the Australian Medical Association has warned of $20 co-payments for shorter consultations. About 40,000 people have signed a petition against the copayment and new Health Minister Sussan Ley has yet to start the sales pitch, amid speculation the regulations could be disallowed by the Senate.
Palantir functions and clients
Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients
Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients
Since its founding in 2004, Palantir has managed to grow into a billion dollar company while being very surreptitious about what it does exactly. Conjecture abounds. The vague facts dredged up by reporters confirm that Palantir has created a data mining system used extensively by law enforcement agencies and security companies to connect the dots between known criminals.
TechCrunch has received a private document from 2013 which reveals the company’s extensive trove of data analysis tools and lists many of its key clients. The document is currently being passed around as an investor prospectus for a new secondary round.
In short, the description above is in part correct. But, thanks to this leaked information, we now know far more about the secretive company.
Palantir’s data analysis solution targets three industries: government, the finance sector and legal research. Each of these industries must wrestle with massive sets of data. To do this, Palantir’s toolsets are aimed at massive data caches, allowing litigators and the police to make connections otherwise invisible. For example, a firm hired by the Securities Investment Protection Corporation used Palantir’s software to sort through the mountains of data, over 40 years of records, to convict Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff (of all things).
Palantir’s software sits on top of existing data sets and provides users with what seems like a revolutionary interface. Users do not have to use SQL queries or employ engineers to write strings in order to search petabytes of data. Instead, natural language is used to query data and results are returned in real-time.
Clients include the Los Angeles Police Department which used Palantir to parse and connect 160 data sets: Everyone from detectives to transit cops to homeland security officials uses Palantir at the LAPD. According to the document, Palantir provides a timeline of events and has helped the massive police department sort its records.
The leaked report quotes Sergeant Peter Jackson of the LAPD stating: “Detectives love the type of information it [Palantir] provides. They can now do things that we could not do before. They can now exactly see great information and the links between events and people. It’s brought great success to LAPD. It supports the cops on the streets and the officers doing the investigations. It is a great tool. They are becoming more efficient and more effective cops. Palantir is allowing them to better serve the public.”
Palantir explains that it is a toolset for use in human analysis on its website. However, we now understand that the service is a smarter way of displaying data for analysis by humans. It is capable of building comprehensive models of activity to detect suspicious anomalies and is even able to provide immunity to fraud thanks to strategies the founders learned while still at PayPal.
Palantir’s anti-fraud system uses algorithms to detect and isolate patterns designated by analysts. This approach was inspired by combating adaptive threats at PayPal, the leaked document states. Four out of the five people on the Palantir management team worked at PayPal. Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was also a PayPal co-founder.
The document confirms that Palantir is employed by multiple US Government agencies. One of the company’s first contracts was with the Joint IED Defeat Organization in 2006. From 2007-2009 Palantir’s work in Washington expanded from eight pilots to more than 50 programs.
As of 2013, Palantir was used by at least 12 groups within the US Government including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED-defeat organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services were planning on pilot testing the use of Palantir in 2013 to investigate tips received through a hotline. A second test was run by the same organization to identify potentially fraudulent medical providers in the Southern region of the US.
However, as of 2013, not all parts of the military used Palantir. The U.S. Army developed its own data analysis tool called the Distributed Common Ground System at a cost of $2.3 billion, but it is believed that it is not very popular. The leaked document cites a 2012 study where 96% of the surveyed war fighters in Afghanistan recommended Palantir.
The prospectus holds that the US military used Palantir with great success. The Pentagon used the software to track patterns in roadside bomb deployment and was able to conclude that garage-door openers were being used as remote detonators. With Palantir, the Marines are now able to upload DNA samples from remote locations and tap into information gathered from years of collecting fingerprints and DNA evidence. The results are returned almost immediately. Without Palantir, the suspects would have already moved onto a different location by the time the field agents received the results.
Samuel Reading, a former Marine who works in Afghanistan for NEK Advanced Securities Group, a U.S. military contractor, was quoted in the document as saying It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of. You will know every single bad guy in your area.”
“It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of. You will know every single bad guy in your area.”
The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir. In fact, cyber analysts working for the now-defunct Information Warfare Monitor used the system to mine data on the China-based cyber groups GhostNet and The Shadow Network.
Yet Palantir is not exclusively used by governments or law enforcement agencies. The company’s data solution works equally as well in more pedestrian pursuits.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists uses Palantir to gain insight into the global trade and illegal trafficking of human tissue. And, as we mentioned before, the K2 Intelligence firm was employed by the SIPC to conquer the 20 terabytes of data in its case against Bernie Madoff. The leaked report quotes Jeremy Kroll, CEO and Co-founder of K2, saying that Palantir was able to construct a story around several key events in the Madoff saga in just a couple of hours.
In the business of dealing with some of the world’s most sensitive sets of data, secrecy is clearly important to Palantir’s success. This document likely only gives a glimpse into Palantir’s true capability and reach, especially since it was current just over a year and a half ago. There’s probably a great deal of Palantir information still out there, waiting to be discovered — More than a Madoff’s worth.
Middle image via aki51
Outsourced health analytics deal
http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilversel/2015/01/06/108m-analytics-outsourcing-deal-puts-health-catalyst-at-risk-for-allina-health-outcomes/
$108M Analytics Outsourcing Deal Puts Health Catalyst At Risk For Allina Health Outcomes
A major Minnesota health system is outsourcing its entire analytics operation in a 10-year, $108 million deal with a twist: The technology vendor has a financial incentive to assure that Minneapolis-based Allina Health actually improves patient outcomes and reduces the cost of care.
Under the terms of the contract, announced Tuesday, Allina is sending its data warehousing, analytics, performance improvement technology, clinical knowledge and all of its related employees to privately held healthcare analytics company Health Catalyst.
In return, Allina receives full subscription rights to Health Catalyst’s technology, as well as an unspecified equity stake in Health Catalyst, which grew out of clinical improvement efforts at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City.
About 20 percent of the contract value is dependent on Allina showing better outcomes and lower costs. A committee that will govern the Health Catalyst-Allina partnership will annually make a list of clinical improvement projects, setting measurable outcomes goals, the vendor says.
“It’s really a shared-risk contract,” Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton tells Forbes.com. “It’s the first example that we’re aware of in healthcare” in which the analytics vendor’s payments are dependent on the client’s performance, Burton adds.
Health Catalyst envisions Allina Health’s 12 hospitals and nearly 100 outpatient clinics becoming a “living laboratory” for healthcare improvement. “We expect that this process of using analytics to prioritize projects, in combination with risk-sharing economics, will encourage far more focus and alignment than is found in traditional health system-vendor relationships,” Allina CFO Duncan Gallagher says in a press release.
“We hope that this becomes a trend in the industry,” Burton says.
Providers themselves have had to become accountable to insurance companies, including the federal Medicare program. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers incentives for healthcare entities to form “accountable care organizations,” and private payers as well as state governments have followed suit.
This deal, with its performance-based component, brings accountability to a vendor, according to Burton. “The healthcare industry has invested tens of billions of dollars in upgrading their technology without holding their technology vendors accountable.”
Allina actually was Health Catalyst’s first customer in 2008, but ran out of projects for the vendor two years later. The two reconnected in 2013, having discussions that led to this 10-year contract.
The Economist: The end of the population pyramid
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/11/daily-chart-10?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/dc/vi/endofpopulationpyramid
Daily chart: The end of the population pyramid | The Economist
The end of the population pyramid
The shape of the world’s demography is changing
THE pyramid is a traditional way of visualising and explaining the age structure of a society. If you draw a chart with each age group represented by a bar, and each bar ranged one above the other—youngest at the bottom, oldest at the top, and with the sexes separated—that is the shape you get. The pyramid was characteristic of human populations since the day organised societies emerged. With lifespans short and mortality rates high, children were always the most numerous group, and old people the least. Now the shape of the global population is changing. Between 1970 and 2015 the dominating influence on the global population was the fertility rate, the number of children a woman would typically bear during her lifetime. It fell dramatically over the period, meaning that the world shifted from having larger to smaller families. The age groups start to become markedly smaller only about the age of 40, so the incline starts much further up the chart than with the pyramid. The shape looks more like the dome of the Capitol building in Washington, DC. Between 2015 and 2060 the biggest influence upon the population will be ageing. Small families are already becoming the norm, the fall in fertility is slowing down and now almost everyone is living longer than their parents—dramatically so in developing countries. So, by 2060, the dome will have come and gone and the shape of the population will look more like a column (or perhaps an old-fashioned beehive).
Read the full article from The World In 2015.
Coca-Cola’s internal comms management
http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141007162311-30084557-the-new-way-we-need-to-schedule-meetings?_mSplash=1&trk=api*a171147*s179395*
The Genius Way Coca-Cola Employees Manage Their Email, Plus More Tips
Oct 7, 2014
Forget work/life balance. You can sleep when you die.
At least that’s how Snapchat’s Emily White and Coca Cola’s Wendy Clark said they approach time management in a hyper-connected world. And the idea of unplugging? Ha.
“Rather than the choice to consciously disconnect, there’s much more of a trend of choosing who to connect with and in what context,” White said. “It’s very much about conversations.”
During a panel at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit on Monday, White, the COO of Snapchat and a veteran of Instagram, Facebook and Google, said she now relies on her phone more than her computer to get work done. “You’re not just getting information and solving problems; you’re getting to communicate in motion like never before,” White said. “This is the reason I can have kids and still have a relationship with them, and work in the evenings when I get home [after the kids are in bed].”
For Clark, the president of sparkling brands and strategic marketing for Coca-Cola North America, being present at work or with her family is the key to living in an over-connected world. “The thing people want most from you is your focus and attention,” Clark said. “You destroy that when you think that you’re multitasking because you’re not accomplishing either.”
That means no phones at the dinner table, for her or her kids. And if she’s expecting an urgent email from the CEO when they’re putt-putt golfing, she’s found the best thing to do is tell them that mommy needs to go respond to an email for 10 minutes and hope they don’t screw up her score while she’s gone.
So when you’re constantly connected, how do you get anything done?
- Make the most of your subject lines. Clark said that at Coca-Cola, employees include tags in their subject lines to help manage email flow: URGENT, ACTION REQUIRED and INFORM.
- Form habits you can keep. Recognize that you’re setting the standard for what people in your life will do, White said. If you start emailing people at night, people will expect you to be on email at night.
- Give yourself white space during the day. Clark’s a fan of Google’s “speedy” meeting invitations, which are constrained to 50 minutes, without an option to override the system. By changing the standard for meetings to 25 or 50 minutes, the remaining five or 10 minutes can be used to check email or go to the bathroom, allowing everyone to be more present when they’re together.
- Set boundaries. Camille Preston, author of Rewired, says having boundaries will help you with willpower. Put fences up to focus on what you want to do at that time.
- Don’t hit send. If you want to work on the weekends, save your emails as drafts, but don’t actually send them until Monday unless they’re urgent. As a leader, you need to let people enjoy their weekends.
For more coverage of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, go here.
To continue the conversation about issues that are relevant to professional women, visit Connect: Professional Women’s Network.
10 Predicaments Facing a New CEO
http://www.iedp.com/Blog/Ten-Predicaments-Facing-a-New-CEO
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Finally the day arrived, when Peter was appointed as the CEO of the multinational technology giant. After months of speculation, apprehension and expectation; all came to a logical conclusion and everyone sighed with relief. Stakeholders were satisfied, the board were confident of having made the right choice, and the outgoing CEO felt that he was leaving the company in safe hands. When a week long ceremony and celebrations were over, Peter got some reflective moments to himself. That night, he could not sleep. He wondered, ‘what next’? Where does he go now, from here onward? Who to look up to, where to escalate and where does the buck stop now? Unfortunately, the buck now stops with him. Peter knew that from now onwards, everybody including customers, stakeholders, employees, the market and board will look to him for direction; looking for those ‘Pearls of Wisdom’ that he had been craving to apply or holding on to reveal now that he had reached this stage. This a usual scenario in most companies, where succession has happened or is likely to happen in the near future. CEOs are always in the ‘Hot Seat’, irrespective of whether their businesses are struggling due to competition, context or capability; or doing exceptionally but where the continual drive for aspirational growth continues. They have to deal with a number of predicaments that put a strain on their time, energy and decision making. Either way, here are 10 top dilemmas new CEOs will do well to know in advance and brace their organizations to deal with effectively:
Finding business coherence amidst the randomness of internal and external events is a perpetual dilemma for the CEOs. A lot will depend upon, how he marshals his resources in new and innovative ways to discover that elusive growth orbit for which he has been appointed as the CEO. Discovering new ways of value creation and building conviction around them will help him deal with above predicaments, effectively. Each and every dilemma must be dealt with a filter of Staying Relevant – Proactive Disruption and Building case for Strategic Change. Finally, not everyone will understand the path undertaken by CEO but as long as these paths enable him and the company ‘Stay Relevant’ to its customers, they must be pursued with conviction. Illustration: King Arthur. Fresco (detail) in the Corridor, Trinci Palace, Foligno, Italy Further Information
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VIEWPOINT: No career move is more profound than the step up to CEO. 
Himanshu Saxena is a thinker, writer and speaker on concepts such as Big Picture, Reimagination, Strategy & Innovation and Leadership@Top Level. He is currently enabling TCS BPS in aligning strategy, coaching and developing leaders of tomorrow.
Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at the Tuck School at Dartmouth and the author of NYT and WSJ Best Seller, Reverse Innovation.Eisenhower: “What is urgent is rarely important and what is important is rarely urgent”
“What is urgent is rarely important and what is important is rarely urgent”.
– Dwight Eisenhower (34th USA President)