October 2009
18 posts
Dollar distribution
Jason Shafrin summing a study:
The healthiest 76% of Medicare beneficiaries consume only 14% of program expenditures. The sickest 15% consume 75% of Medicare expenditures.
September 2009
16 posts
WatchExcept for calling the fax machine obsolete (kidding, see below), Tim Brown of IDEO gets this one exactly right. Design thinking will be an important part of ridding waste from our health care system in the short term (that 30 percent figure we continue to hear about). Ten years on (if I have my way, more like five…or three), it will be the strategy for value creation (sorry for the...
“I make it a rule never to criticize something unless I can offer a solution.”
– That’s Don Norman expressing my New (3/4 through the) Year’s Resolution in “The Design of Everyday Things.”
Social media, simple for hospitals still waiting
Okay, social media tools seem like they’re here to stay (dripping sarcasm) and if your hospital isn’t on this list (only 367 hospitals have any kind of social media presence, that leaves a few thousand still to start), it’s really time to be there.
You don’t need a social media expert to jump in, many of them are selling snake oil anyway. Send an email to everyone in your...
Health is a game
Jane is a game designer and concussed herself while writing a book (update: that reads funny, she actually concussed herself when she hit her head on a cabinet door, fluke). The recovery became agonizing. So she created a real world game:
SuperBetter is a superhero-themed game that turns getting better into a multi-player adventure. It’s designed to help anyone recovering from an injury, or...
Transformative teams
Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple:
We have assembled a heavenly design team. By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare. Our physical environment reflects and enables that collaborative approach. The large open studio and massive sound system support a...
Wrong
My skepticism is high. The new Joint Commission’s Center for Transforming Healthcare is a noble effort, but few organizations throughout history have been able to radically alter the way they do business (success story: IBM). The Joint Commission is trying to become an organization that “helps” hospitals but is likely to carry an aura of punitiveness well into the future.
...
Trend? Phantom Medicine...
Two interesting tidbits:
First, Wired has an interesting bit about how placebos are flummoxing the pharma world by actually becoming effective treatments (worth the read):
Ironically, Big Pharma’s attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn’t care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of...
Premium: $30,803
Drew Altman of KFF:
On the other hand, if we assume increases revert to the average of the last ten years—an average annual increase of about 8.7% and a very plausible scenario—premiums in 2019 will average a whopping $30,803, a very scary number.
Here’s a less-than-bold prognostication: it can’t get that high, just can’t. The cost of health care is not well known to...
The Modern Day Hawthorne Effect
Matt Mosley at ESPN:
For now, Jones truly believes the opening of Cowboys Stadium will serve as a motivating force for his team in ‘09. He’s done everything except name the stadium a team captain, but I think that’s probably coming Sunday night. “I think our team will play to the level of the new stadium,” Jones said at the beginning of training camp....
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