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Showing posts from March, 2012

Diabesity: What if our best practices are the wrong practices?

The Daily Beast :   "...what if we are coordinating the wrong kind of care? What if our best practices are the wrong practices? Our toxic industrial diet, our sedentary lifestyle, chronic stress, and environmental toxins cause diabesity and its attendant downstream ills (often mislabeled as something else, such as hypertension, cancer, heart disease, dementia). Drugs and surgery are feeble, ineffective, costly, and often harmful treatments for lifestyle-induced illness. They are misguided efforts at best, dangerous at worst. Mounting evidence proves that the solution to lifestyle- and diet-driven obesity-related illnesses won’t be found at the bottom of a prescription bottle; they will be found at the end of our fork." [...] "Health it seems happens outside the clinic, where people live, work, play and pray. We need to rethink how we treat chronic disease. It is not only better medical management, which often just barely if at all staves off complications and death,...

Study: iPads Improve Doctors' Efficiency

(CBS News) "iPads not only make doctors feel more efficient at their jobs, the device actually improved their work flow according to a new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine ." 75% of residents said iPads saved them about an hour each day. I'll bet physician loyalty and integration rank high on your hospital's agenda.  Yet what have you done lately to save YOUR docs an hour a day?  No, really, I'm asking!  Leave a comment... Or connect with me (Steve Davis) on Twitter @whatifwhynot .

Got Problems? Better Have Answers!

John Commins, for HealthLeaders Media:   Your Hospital is Not Invisible . "It doesn't matter if your hospital is in midtown Manhattan or Manhattan, KS. It doesn't matter how many licensed beds you have or how high you scored with HealthGrades. If you've got problems at your hospital—from labor disputes, to HIPAA violations, to dirty sheets—you'd better be prepared to have answers for the government, public advocacy groups, plaintiffs' attorneys, and the news media." Just ask 88-bed Sheridan (WY) Memorial Hospital.

"Why do doctors think their time is more valuable than yours?"

Cheryl Clark, for HealthLeaders Media:   Patients Set to Unleash Feedback on Doctors . "Doctors should brace for an earful about scheduling difficulties, hour-long waits, perceived disrespectful attitudes, and unreturned phone calls. "I know doctors think these aspects of the care process are, in the big scheme of things, minor annoyances that have nothing to do with their skills in diagnosis and treatment. "But perceived mistreatment by physicians and their staffs may have an enormous indirect, much more subtle, impact on patient compliance, and ultimately on quality and outcomes. [...] "And I don't think doctors are at all prepared for this. They'll no longer be able to brush away a bad review as just another outlier on Yelp. In time, there will be a real cost associated with bad reviews. "Many physicians have no idea what CGCAHPS is, and that value-based purchasing is coming soon for them," says Patricia Riskind, senior vice president ...

One-third of hospitals closed by 2020?

 Buy Here  From David Houle and Jonathan Fleece blogging at KevinMD.com: "Why one-third of hospitals will close by 2020." Why?  Because hospitals are expensive, unsafe, "abysmal" at delivering customer care and poorly equiped to compete in the networked, transparent, not-so-distant future.  "One-third of hospitals gone in eight years."    Long-time readers of this modest little blog probably aren't surprised.  But I'll bet it's caught a few CEOs off guard, especially those fond of saying things like "I don't have to outrun the bear, just the other guys."  You know what I mean.  You've heard the joke.  Except it was never very funny and now, as strategies go, it might be deadly. (Houle and Fleece are the authors of " The New Health Age: The Future of Health Care in America." )