C'Mon Steve Jobs, You Can Do Better Than This!

As much as I'm a fan of Apple Computer's products, their response to the iPhone 4 antenna problem is clumsy and misguided. I don't want to hear Apple (or, frankly, anybody else) saying "our products are no worse than Brand X's..."

I'm paying you, Apple, for products that are noticeably BETTER than Brand X, not just as bad.

Nor do I want to hear that it's really the consumer's fault. That's code for saying I'm an idiot.

I'm paying you, Apple, for products that work so well I end up looking smarter than I really am. Only my daughters get to call me an idiot.

And, Steve, you ain't them so knock it off. You need a better PR/crisis response team. Call me. I can help. Really. On my iPhone 3G, though.

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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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"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...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 ...

Health Care Strategist

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