Here are three more "smart medicine" ways to make healthcare cheaper by making it better. This first one that might be kind of surprising, because it is not high-tech at all: For any procedure that has standard steps that are important, use a simple,...
Here are three different ideas that are about what we do, for whom, for how much. The first one is about a difficult reality: We spend vast sums on heroic measures trying to save frail elderly people who are very near death, people that everyone involved knows are...
I count at least 15 ways to make healthcare better, faster and cheaper for everyone. All of them are about value: finding what works and what doesn't at what price, finding ways for people who use healthcare and whoever pays for it to choose that value, and...
H&HN Weekly 3/3/09I recently spent some time in Gloucester, Mass., watching little boats—the precarious remnants of a once-mighty fishing fleet—toddle in and out of the narrow harbor neck. I thought about the so-called perfect storm, that combination of factors...
(From The Physician Executive, Vol. 35 #1, Jan/Feb 2009, pp 50-53) Imagine you are an explorer, scouting out new territory, with the help of a local guide – a mathematically-inclined local guide. You come to a river. You ask whether it can be forded: “How deep is it?”...
(From Hospitals and Health Networks Weekly, January 28, 2009)Merely covering all Americans in some fashion to pay for the system we have now would fall far short of creating a system that works. In fact, that would take far more than federal legislation, but the...
