Skip to main content

Thanks For Reading!

Time to thank a few more readers, notably,
  • Franciscan Hospital, Cincinnati, OH
  • Renown Health, Sparks and Reno, NV
  • Core Foundation, Chicago, IL
  • University of Pittsburgh, PA
  • GE Medical / UK
  • UBS, London, UK
  • New York State Health Department, Albany, NY
  • Mercy Hospital / Medical Center, Des Moines, IA
  • Alliance Life Sciences Consulting Group, NJ
  • Catholic Health Care West, Mission Hills, CA
  • Global Capacity, Dallas, TX
  • University of Minnesota, MN
  • Citgo Petroleum Corporation, Katy, TX
  • Bloomberg, London, UK
  • Press Ganey Associates, South Bend, IN
  • Candid Health Care, Houston, TX
  • Northwest Hospital Center, MD
  • Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta, GA
  • BrainBank, Inc., Montreal
Last but not least, thanks to the Guardians of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness at Cyveillance, a Washington D.C. company billing itself as "The World Leader In Cyber Intelligence..." for visiting a recent post in which I used some unkind words - including 'fraud' - to describe the textbook publishing industry. 

Fraud!  Fraud!  Fraud!  There, that should keep 'em coming back for a while longer.

Thanks for reading, even to the spooks!  Leave a comment next time.  I am no threat to anybody except those afraid of words and the occasional debate.    

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare

My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved