Virus Wipes Out Medical Records at Hospital in India
This is a good warning for hospitals everywhere. According to the story the hospital was short on IT people. As you can see this is a big hospital seeing 15,000…
Waiting for the Robot Wheelchair
I’ve taken a lot of grief in the past for my prediction that robots will play a key role in nursing over the long term. There will still be jobs…
Teenage Cancer Survivor Perseveres by Blogging
When Clarissa was 13 she entered Johns Hopkins Hospital to be treated for relapsed acute leukemia knowing full well that she had only a 40% chance of survival. Today she…
Mental Health Cost Cuts Strain Law Enforcement
So-called austerity measures, a strategy in many Republican-dominated state legislatures to control spending, are getting increased attention nationally, spurred by the international news story that is Wisconsin’s budget battle. Within…
Really Oxfam? Really?
Oxfam hasn’t let pesky little things like representative household surveys and impact evaluation results get in the way of their condemnation of Ghana’s health insurance program. The organization recently issued…
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…
