There are times my words mark an inflection point in the lives of my patients and their families. This recognition takes time to fully appreciate, and I will never forget the first time it hit me. I was a resident working an evening shift in the ED. The place was packed with a full waiting …
I just returned from a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe with my wife and kids – a truly awesome (and thoroughly exhausting) experience we’ve been planning for the last year. In between seeing the old-world sites that make Paris and London ridiculously lucrative tourist destinations, I jotted a couple of healthcare-related observations I feel compelled to …
While Speaker Ryan has acknowledged that ACA will remain "the law of the land for the foreseeable future," a looming question remains - what next? For all the challenges with the now shelved AHCA - and there were many - Obamacare has never been perfect and is far from becoming perfect. There are substantial …
Healthcare is expensive. And complicated. Its current trajectory in America - one that yields an ever-accelerating rise in both cost and complexity - is clearly unsustainable. This reality, combined with the outsized role government plays in regulating and paying for healthcare, presents Washington with an enormous policy challenge. Healthcare's web of interconnectedness means any change …
Perhaps the buzziest buzzword of 2017 (with the potential exception of "design thinking") is BLOCKCHAIN. Hailed as the answer to all our problems with IT privacy and connectivity across every industry worldwide, I've had more blockchain emails, articles, and messages hit my inbox in the last few months than all other "solutions of the future" …
Many potholes await us as we drive America's healthcare system down the road towards a (still slightly amorphous) vision of "population health." Can lots of providers manage risk as well or better than the small minority of those doing so today? Will the payment system transition fast enough to drive change but not so fast …
In my last post I referenced "the pursuit of happiness." These words are from the most important sentence in American history - the first sentence of the preamble to our Declaration of Independence. You probably remember memorizing them as a 4th grader, but just in case the words are escaping you: We hold these truths …
One major benefit of supporting Mission's extraordinary Security team is that I'm exposed to books that wouldn't normally hit my radar. The most recent example (thanks Robert Whiteside) is Left of Bang by Van Horne and Riley. In the book's language "bang" is the explosion of an IED, an active shooter in a hospital, a …
These two books are some of my most prized medical possessions. The first, Combe's Physiology, is an 1843 edition of a text by Andrew Combe, MD, "Physician Extraordinaire to the Queen in Scotland and Consulting Physician to the King and Queen of the Belgians." The title page takes care to note that 6 woodcuts appear …
Imagine its 1846 and we’re in Vienna. You’ve just given birth and are waiting in your “child bed” to see the physician team, totally blind to the fact that you have a three times greater chance of dying (about 1 in 10) then the woman next to you being cared for by a midwife (about 1 …
