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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
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.
By MICHAEL MILLENSON Twenty years ago this month, the Boston Globe disclosed that health columnist Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old mother of two, had been killed by a drug overdose during treatment for breast cancer at Dana-Farber Cancer Center. In laying out a grim trail of preventable mistakes at a renowned institution, the Globe prompted local […]
By MICHAEL MILLENSON A few years ago, I was upgraded to First Class on a flight from California back to Chicago. Not long after I settled in, a tall, muscular man easily four inches taller than me walked up to my aisle seat in the first row and prepared to sit by the window. I envisioned […]
By Michael L. Millenson I was reading a medical home advocacy group’s upbeat approach to a recent JAMA study that had found scant benefit in the concept when, suddenly, we tumbled into Alice in Wonderland territory. The press release from the leadership of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC) started out reasonably enough. The three-year study […]
By Michael L. Millenson The reason that Republicans shut down the federal government, it turns out, was to “restore patient-centered healthcare in America.” Huh? As the lead author of a policy paper entitled, “Will the Affordable Care Act Move Patient-Centeredness to Center Stage?” I admit to a certain guilty thrill when I read this precise […]
By Michael L. Millenson Forget for a moment the familiar scenes of action and outraged reaction that are playing out in our long-running national debate over how best to provide access to health care for every American. Instead, ask one simple question: what happens in the doctor’s office or hospital once access is achieved. I set […]
By Michael L. Millenson Welcome, students, to our special combined 9th grade math and civics class. Today, we’re going to look at the “Cadillac tax” in the Affordable Care Act. Yes, Mitt, you have a question already? No, no, “Cadillac tax” is just an expression. No one is going to tax your family’s cars, Mitt, […]
By Michael L. Millenson Stealthily, AHRQ has acquired a new head, but the ax still hovers over it. Very quietly, researcher Richard Kronick, PhD was named by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to be the new director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). He joins an organization that remains […]
By Michael L. Millenson If you wanted to know what doctors thought about money and medical practice, including plumber envy, you’d read American Medical News(AMN). That’s the biweekly newspaper the American Medical Association just announced it’s shutting down. Unlike JAMA, in which doctors appear as white-coated scientists, AMN focused on practical and political issues, not least of which was […]