Saturday, October 27, 2012

MedHab to Drive Down Hospital Readmissions?


Could rainmaker and MedHab CEO Johnny Ross sell water to a drowning man?  Maybe, given his latest effort garnering MedHab free publicity.  The Dallas Business Journal reported:

Most companies love repeat customers. Hospitals, not so much.

Hospitals love repeat business, just not within thirty days of an overnight hospital stay for the same clinical condition.   Here's MedHab's solution to "drive down readmissions:"

MedHab, another medical device company based in Fort Worth, has a product that helps orthopedic surgeons evaluate whether patients are doing their rehabilitation exercises correctly after they leave the hospital.

How many orthopedic surgeons treat heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia?  Those are the three clinical conditions for which hospitals can be fined by Medicare. In 2015 penalties can be imposed for readmissions due to COPD, CABG, PTCA and other vascular conditions. Still no knee surgery.

The other issue is how much knee surgery is done on an inpatient basis, i.e. with an overnight hospital stay.  If total knee replacements are outpatient surgery, I expect tendon and ligament repairs go home the same day.

Failure to do knee rehabilitation exercises correctly is not a contributor to hospital readmissions, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Johnny Ross sold MedHab as a solution to a nonexistent problem.  Dallas Business Journal swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Update 11-9-12:  The fiction continues on Upstart Business Journal

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have any of these devices been sold or even produced?