By Jeff Goldsmith There has been a lot of controversy in health policy circles recently about hospital market consolidation and its effect on costs. However, less noticed than the quickened pace of industry consolidation is a more puzzling and largely unremarked-upon development: hospitals seem to have hit the wall in technological innovation. One can wonder [...]
By Michael Fleming, MD Years ago, as a family physician in Louisiana, I made house calls. Certain patients were too sick or too hurt to get to my office. Sometimes a condition or injury had worsened, requiring my evaluation bedside. I would visit patients at home for the simplest of reasons: home was where they [...]
By Shiv Gaglani What if the next time you step into your doctor’s office for an examination, she reaches into her white coat pocket and pulls out an iPhone instead of a stethoscope? That’s the idea behind The Smartphone Physical, a re-imagination of the physical exam using only smartphones and a few devices that connect [...]
By MICHAEL MILLENSON The Leapfrog Group has just released its latest report grading the safety of hundreds of individual hospitals, but the real news isn’t the“incremental progress.” It’s how a group started by some of the most powerful corporations in America has quietly devolved into just one more organization hoping press releases produce change. Amid the [...]
By David Halpert, MD Last week, CMS unilaterally released chargemaster data from 300 hospitals around the country. As David Dranove summed up well in his recent piece, this is an old hat. Yes, there are big variations in hospitals’ chargemasters. And yes, there is a lot of buzz around consumer price shopping. A Kayak for [...]
By DAVID SHAYWITZ The birthers, it turns out, aren’t the only ones with wacky conspiracy theories; evidently a lot of people out there really think there are cures “They” don’t want you to know about. In particular, there seems to be a surprisingly pervasive belief that drug companies aren’t working on cures for disease because [...]
By Adam Wong, ONC and Abdul Shaikh, NCI ONC and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are challenging app developers to create new tools to help cancer survivors. The new Crowds Care for Cancer: Supporting Survivors Challenge is asking app developers to create new tools meant to help survivors manage their care after they have completed cancer [...]
Most days I stay busy from sun up to sun down. It’s not that I like to have such a crazy schedule, but there are so many things I want and feel the need to do each day that it’s hard to take it easy. I confess, I do take a restful day usually on Sunday, to enjoy time with family and friends because I believe one day of rest is needed to recharge and refresh. All throughout my busy days however, I find …
By JAMES SALWITZ Dear Ms. Jolie, Thank you for your bravery and leadership in the battle against breast cancer. In a small way, through my patients, I understand the challenge and pain it took not only to undergo prophylactic mastectomies, because you carry the BRCA1 cancer gene, but also to reveal this deeply personal part [...]
The E-mail I Want to Send to Our Tech Guys But Keep Deleting (40) By Shirie Leng, MD It really shouldn’t be this hard. This doesn’t seem like rocket science, but you keep telling us it is. What’s the deal with the passwords? Why can’t computers at different hospitals talk to each other? What’s the [...]