Why Pilot Programs are a Waste of Time and Money
President Obama has repeatedly given us his vision of how to lower the cost of health care and raise its quality: Find out what works; then get everyone else to…
Japanese Dog Sniffs Out Colon Cancer
Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Japanese scientists have trained an 8-year-old Labrador retriever to detect colon cancer by sniffing samples of breath and stool from…
Trends in Medical Care – Overview
There are a series of medical megatrends outlined in my book The Future of Medicine – Megatrends in Healthcare that will profoundly affect health care in the coming five to…
Guest Article: Safe Social Networking is Good for Patients
Patricia Walling, a graduate student working who has both professional and volunteer experience in a hospital environment, reached out to me via e-mail recently about some of her ideas of…
Alternative Quality Contract
“In January 2009 Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts launched a new provider payment system called the Alternative Quality Contract that exemplifies the type of experimentation with novel payment models…
Drug Dispensing Robot at Hospital Pharmacy
The pharmacist is called “Riva” “Robotic ID Automation” the robot that does the compounding, filling and so on. One of the big advantages is that there’s no human hand touching…
Robot Tests Chemicals for Toxicity
The 10,000 chemicals to be tested will include chemicals in industrial and consumer products as well as food additives and drugs. So far 2500 chemicals for potential toxicity have been…
Device Companies Renew Interest in Startups
At a recent medtech conference, and discussed by WSJ, it was noted that the big device companies (e.g., J&J, Medtronic, Boston Scientific) are looking to startups to help bolster their…
CMS to Announce ACO Regs Soon
What exactly is an accountable care organization? Interestingly, the term is as much a catch-all for reform as it is a strict rubric for quantifying certain efforts of reform. The…
No Lack of Self Esteem
Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. A survey of high school students found that 70 percent of them have above-average leadership skills and only 2…
