Making Medicine Great Again

By MICHAEL MILLENSON The annual Lown Institute Conference advocates for the “right” kind of patient care, as in “the correct course of action.” But the political meanings of “right” and “left” also echo, sounding like a healthcare version of the recover-lost-glory demands of Donald Trump and the moral crusade of Bernie Sanders. The program for this year’s

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Echoes Of Trump, Sanders At ‘Right Care’ Meeting

If Lown wants to change the “culture” that prompts those [unnecessary CT] scan orders….I suggest finding some moms willing to publicly agree that not treating their child’s “intracranial bleeds and skull fractures” (as the research phrased it) was perfectly fine.

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The ACO Information Vacuum

By KIP SULLIVAN In my three-part series on why we know so little about ACOs, I presented three arguments: We have no useful information on what ACOs do for patients; that’s because the definition of “ACO” is not a definition but an expression of hope; and the ACO’s useless definition is due to dysfunctional habits

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The Profitability (Or Not) Of Harming Patients

A quiet effort has been going on for years to persuade hospitals they can make more money preventing patient harm than by allowing it to occur. When the government announced last week that a patient safety partnership with hospitals had saved 87,000 li…

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The Dangerous Patient Safety Delusions of Eminence-Based Medicine

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON The eminent physicians Martin Samuels and Nortin Hadler have piled onto the patient safety movement, wielding a deft verbal knife alongwith a questionable command of the facts. They are the defenders of the “nobility”off medicine against the algorithm-driven “fellow travelers” of the safety movement. On the one side, apparatchiks; on the

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Key for Health IT Entrepreneurs: Don’t Disrupt the Wrong Thing

By MICHAEL MILLENSON Among the 200 demos, 60 exhibitors and more than 100 speakers at the annual Health 2.0 conference on digital health, a critical insight for succeeding in this burgeoning market might have gotten lost in the noise. The crucial advice came on separate days from two of the savviest digerati doctors in Silicon Valley. Not coincidentally, both Dr.

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Key for Health IT Entrepreneurs: Don’t Disrupt the Wrong Thing

The crucial advice from two of the savviest digerati doctors in Silicon Valley can be summed up this way: disrupt medicine without disrupting the lives of those who practice it.

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Health Datapalooza: A Shot of Whiskey, A “Data Hippie” And Capitalism

Health Datapalooza is dedicated to transforming American medicine. But despite talk of “data liberation” and “health data hippies,” the success of the open data movement is a direct result of a synergistic relationship between government and capitalism…

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Health Datapalooza: A Shot of Whiskey, a “Data Hippie” and Capitalism

Health Datapalooza is dedicated to transforming American medicine. But despite talk of “data liberation” and “health data hippies,” the success of the open data movement is a direct result of a synergistic relationship between government and capitalism…

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Parsing Patient Engagement: Better Compliance Or Better Decisions?

“Better compliance” and “better patient decisions” can certainly co-exist in health IT, but there’s also an implicit tension: What happens if the shared decision making bucks what the doctor thinks best?

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