Medica, one of the largest healthcare insurers operating in Minnesota, is showing some attitude with a new marketing campaign in the Twin Cities. Billboards, bus stop and skyway signs show a lesbian couple holding hands, an ear with a huge stud earring, a baby holding a toy block, and a woman with a little girl lying on a blanket. The message is that Medica has “plans that fit your life.”

Are spinal fusion procedures on the way out? Health plans and a growing number of doctors think too many patients are getting lumbar fusions without first exhausting less expensive non-surgical options such as exercise, physical therapy and epidural steroid injections.

The healthcare reform law is indisputably an emotionally charged, complicated piece of legislation that can thwart even the best intellects and intentions.Just take LifeScience Alley’s seminar on how the law will impact Minnesota’s healthcare industry. By my last count, I witnessed an unfortunate analogy, two Freudian slips, and an ill conceived attempt at humor…I think.

Count HealthPartners CEO Mary Brainerd as another healthcare official who neither buys the logic behind the nurses demand for set staffing levels, nor the union’s stated reason for embracing the issue as its rallying cry.Brainerd is hardly a neutral expert. HealthPartners, based in Minneapolis, operates three hospitals, all of them non-union. Yet as leader of [...]

Patients will measure their vital signs such as blood pressure, pulse and weight, and respond to questions related to their diseases on a daily basis. A clinical care team will review the data, and will be able to use videoconferencing to further evaluate the patients.

Drug companies face bills that require disclosure of industry payments to doctors and funding for medication waste disposal.

Judging from HealthPartners’ annual pay-for-performance figures, Americans seem to have received considerably less quality care in 2009. While the company’s overall pool of incentive pay rose nearly 19 percent to $24.9 million, its Partners in Excellence program, performance bonuses given to primary care and specialty groups, doled out 45 percent less money this year than 2008, when it paid out $670,000.