by Tony Chen

I have the opportunity to be one of the bloggers at the World Health Care Blog, the blog leading up to the World Healthcare Congress.

The rest of the blogging crew includes:
- Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog
- Emily DeVoto of the Antidote
- Vince Kuraitis of e-CareManagement
- Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline
- David Williams of Health Business Blog
- Scott MacStravic of a lot of books/articles and guest blogger at HFMA Views
- Lloyd Davis of PerfectPath

Among us 8 bloggers, you've got several PhDs, a WSJ Must Read blog, a Forbes Best Blog, a dozen or so books written, several dozen speeches made at conferences, a couple of companies founded, and one accordian concert performed. (note: I only contributed to one thing on this list - guess which one...)

My favorite quote from the blog so far comes from Vince:

Professor Gerard Andersen of Johns Hopkins describes the big picture of changing health system needs:

* 1900 to 1950 — Infectious diseases
* 1950 to 2000 — Episodic care
* 2000 to 2050 — Chronic care

About 6 or 7 years ago the light bulbs went on at Medicare — they recognized the upcoming challenges of baby boomers aging, increasing chronicity, and out of control costs. Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions incur health care expenses highly disproportionately; the more chronic conditions, the higher the costs.

I'll have to chew on this for a while and post something in response later.