Weak Signals Amidst The Economic Gloom?

What if...this is the beginning of the recession's end?

In the midst of dire headlines - "...a nation on edge." (Chicago Tribune), "...Fed Chief Vows To...Stem Crisis." (NY Times), "...suffering a severe contraction." (Yahoo News) there's this from MarketWatch:

"...statistical evidence is mounting to suggest that the worst of this recession may soon be past."

And the author backs up his assertion with 21 data points - good news in some cases, less bad news in others.

You can't read everything and everybody, but a strategist's job is to find weak signals in the midst of noise and blather. To see through the headlines, understanding that their purpose is not to inform, but to sell papers.

And I figured you could use some good news today, weak signal or not.

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Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

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...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...

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