our own system
Hi there, I'm Drew Weilage and I'm working to make healthcare better for patients.
This is a blog with links to healthcare goings on, trends, and uncategorized interestingness as well as attempts to filter my own healthcare thinking through essay.
I am greatly aware of my idealistic, naive even, views on a number of topics. But frankly, I think healthcare is in dire need of more of the "what's possible/what could be" type of thinking. I'm greatly protective of my unabashed idealism but always open to reason and discourse about any of it.
This is round two of my blogging life, the first being archived here.
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Deeper Thoughts
- Health is a Platform
- Health is Co-Created
- Make Healthcare Awesome
- Don't Call It Quality
- Healthcare Needs Hackers
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Think Beta (End Malaria)
I’m a professed pursuer of healthcare perfection. We all know the ills of patient safety (or the lack thereof). But I also fear the perfection pursuit regularly creeps into the business side of healthcare. And by business side, I’m focusing intently on “try new things” to keep healthcare delivery progressing. That’s why I’ve always liked Google’s commitment to beta—and the associated derivative ideas (minimum viable product, iteration, etc.). Healthcare could use a more beta doing.
Anyway, Jeff Jarvis wrote an essay for a Domino Project compilation dedicated to End Malaria Day. Here are Jeff’s words on Beta Think:
Here’s the wonderful irony of beta-think: It says that we can make what we do ever-better because we are never done, never satisfied, always seeking ways to improve by working in public.
More importantly here is the description of what Domino Project is doing to End Malaria:
We’re doing this by giving $20 from the purchase of each copy of End Malaria to Malaria No More to send a mosquito net to a family in need and to support life-saving work in the fight against malaria.
In addition to saving lives, buying this book means you can enjoy essays by 62 of America’s favorite business authors, including Tom Peters, Nicholas Carr, Pam Slim, and Sir Ken Robinson. Organized into three main sections—Focus, Courage, and Resilience — all essays in End Malaria share a desire to inspire readers to look within themselves for solutions to their everyday dilemmas and for motivation to realize their desires.
At its core, End Malaria is about doing great work, and at The Domino Project we believe there’s no better work than saving a life. Please share this book with your friends, family, and coworkers, and encourage them to join us on our quest.
This isn’t entirely to blame for the rise in American obesity, but it’s safe to conclude it has played a part. Stephen Von Worley: “Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!”
This future is not that far away.
Disrupt. Or be disrupted. Frank Moss:
But imagine a far more extreme transformation, in which advances in information technology, biology and engineering allow us to move much of health care out of hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices, and into our everyday lives.
As the above chart shows, bigger government actually polls as more popular in health care than in general. When the New York Times polled on how much government Americans want without specifying “in health,” the numbers flip: the majority of Americans want it to get smaller.
Here’s the link to the poll conducted by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health.
Healthcare’s problem.
“You can’t argue with success.”
Of course you can.
Conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t bother. But arguing with failure is dumb. Failure doesn’t need to be argued with, it’s already failed.
It takes guts to argue with success, guts and insight. And it’s the best way to make things better.
(Coaches for doctors). Another installation in the occasional series of linking to everything Atul Gawande writes.
