June 2010
29 posts
Uh-oh writers...
Cory Doctorow quotes Jason Ford at Boing Boing:
Doctors are being urged to give their patients a legal form that transfers a patient’s copyright over web postings if they mention the doctor or practice online. The doctor can then send a DMCA takedown notice and have the criticism removed from the web without filing a lawsuit. As a fiction writer this worries me greatly, especially since...
May 2010
34 posts
“When Toyota makes mistakes that possibly result in dozens of deaths, the country...”
– What really ails American health care. (via jayparkinsonmd)
The Doctor Will See You Now. Please Log On. →
Who are hospital ads really aimed at? →
Marketplace asks an important question—one that’s difficult to answer. I feel that the majority of hospital advertising is ineffective and that much of the annual billion dollar + spend is wasted (mainly because they’re all the same; try hard to find ads that don’t focus on hospital reputation)—but I’d be willing to be proven wrong.
While improved reimbursement...
WatchJohanna Blakly makes a case for stealing and it’s terrific.
Devolution: a path to success for healthcare?
Kevin Kelly on today’s organization and its struggle with outmoded business models:
There is only one way out. The stuck organism must devolve. In order to go from a peak of local success to another higher peak, it must first go downhill. To do that it must reverse itself and for a while become less adapted, less fit, less optimal. It must do business less efficiently, with less...
A big screw-up
Did you read about 6pm.com’s (a Zappos company) big screw-up last week? Read about it on the company’s blog here.
The short of the long: an error on the website capped all prices for all goods at $50 for a few hours. Customers, as they do, purchased items. 6pm.com (Zappos) realized the mistake and fixed the issue. The company honored all purchases at the mistake price. Zappos lost...
Confirm him!
Paul Levy at Running a Hospital to Senator Scott Brown:
Dear Scott, I understand the Senate confirmation process in Washington, DC, and how the appointment of individuals gets hung up for a variety of political reasons. I don’t particularly like it, but I understand it. But I don’t understand how with regard to the appointment of Don Berwick as head of CMS, the Medicare agency, this...
“In 2009 providers realized their receivables on average 7 days faster across all...”
– That and a bunch more from Health 2.0 darling athenahealth and its 2010 PayerView.
Beating Obesity →
Everything Is Contagious →
E-Health and Web 2.0: The Doctor Will Tweet You... →
“We’re drinking more soda for several reasons. Above all, the...”
– David Leonhardt in NY Times (via Aaron Cohen at kottke.org)
We know it costs more to eat healthily. Reminders never hurt.
Two types of strategy
Ben Casnocha (his bolding) long-form quotes The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel:
… the history of strategy as a struggle between two definitions, strategy as positioning and strategy as organizational learning. The positioning school, led by Harvard’s Porter, sees strategy making as the choice of where you want to compete, in what industry and from what spot within that industry, and...
“Imagine knowing you’ll be too sick to go to work, before the faintest hint of a...”
– Our reality, two.
“The survey, conducted in April 2010 by Capstrat and Public Policy Polling, finds...”
– Our reality.
WatchOne hospital’s HCAHPS data visualized through a painting. Artist Regina Holliday:
… I did it in a painting format to basically make it clear to patients how important this is and how much it is a factor in where you decide to stay.
“A lot of medical schools teach health policy, but they don’t really teach...”
– - Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim
Basically, they don’t teach implementation. Few educational programs do. What is, arguably, the most important skill on the job? Getting things done. And it takes an incredible amount of work to do just that.
Cool news out of Dartmouth (i.e., those...
Why Design Now? National Design Triennial at... →
Boss, I'm getting on a plane
Jonah Lehrer. Brilliance. Scientifically proven:
We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.
Post Script. From the same article:
The larger lesson is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural...
Get flatter (org structure)? It depends... →
“62% of patients receiving an intentionally fake treatment from friendly,...”
– HBR via Boston.com
Be nice.
“Leaving aside the sacred obligation we have to America’s wounded warriors,...”
– Defense Secretary Robert Gates
“If we were completely rational beings, decisions about our health and medical...”
– WSJ Health Blog
Do we give enough attention to the mental aspects of healthcare? The effect of placebos are another example I’d offer.
It's Free!
Well, not really. But it’s sort of like that:
It’s a very odd system where we make purchasing decisions on behalf of patients but we don’t know what anything costs. There’s no disincentive to ordering tests — all we have to do is click a button and we’ve ordered it.
Above, the words of Dr. Neel Shah, a resident at Brigham and Women’s in a New York Times article. Below, those of Dr....
“Where merely complicated systems require mostly deduction and analysis (formal...”
– Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege
It seems the Army has found design thinking and (I’m thinking) healthcare could use its efforts as a model to do the same. Convincing military folks of the value in inductive thinking, it seems, has been a challenge.
“Most of its success is explained by culture and...
Only in The Economist:
Kaiser also aligns incentives both to promote parsimony and to improve the quality, rather than merely the quantity, of the care it gives.
Parsimony has been added to my healthcare vocabulary.
On a related note: here’s the article about Kaiser Permanente. Nothing new; a nod to its success.