Prolific author and THCB favorite Maggie Mahar is doing the honors this week as Health Beat Hosts Health Wonk Review.
POLICY: Taking Out The Trash-Talk
I’m up at Spot-on talking about a particularly crappy study that snuck into a WSJ editorial. I made some snarky remarks about the math skills of economists at the Manhattan Institute in the process. Of course after the editing process a Spot-on it all got a little smoother, shall we say
I’m not too worried that a Republican will actually win the White House in 2008. But I am worried that efforts by what I confidently believe will be a Democratically controlled White House to reform the U.S. health care system will founder on the free-marketeers devotion to faulty statistics, unsound analysis and, well, lying.It’s not a new problem. But it’s one that’s increasingly difficult to combat.
Read the rest and of course come back here to comment if you like.
Health 2.0 Research & Editorial Internship
Become a part of the Health 2.0 revolution! The Health 2.0 Conference team is looking
for a few smart, motivated students to fill unpaid Health 2.0 internships. The interns will work with co-founders Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya on all aspects of the business including the Health 2.0 conference, Internet media properties including ‘The Health Care Blog’ and a Health 2.0 blog, research, and consulting.
Responsibilities will include a wide range of research, editorial, writing, marketing, and event support tasks. The ideal candidates have an interest in healthcare, business, and technology, are detail oriented, Web and media savvy, with excellent writing skills.
JOB POST: Director, US Sales
Wellness Layers Inc. has an immediate
opening for a Director of Sales to lead our US Sales. Wellness Layers helps the world’s leading
fitness, nutrition, health and pharmaceutical companies create private
label customer portals, which are tightly integrated with their services
and products.
The ideal candidate should be based locally within
the NY/NJ area and work from his/her home office and our New York office.
This is a role for a strong leader with a history of building and
leading successful enterprise software sales teams. You must be an
individual with an entrepreneurial spirit, extremely intelligent,
dedicated, and tough enough to work in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
Your responsibility would be to focus on creating opportunities
and selling our unique Web 2.0 Platform product and services to large and
medium customers, focusing on the Wellness, Nutrition, Fitness, Pharma and
Health industries. Target contacts are VP Marketing and Brand Managers.
A Patient in my own hospital by Paul Levy
Paul Levy is CEO at Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Paul was one of the first CEOs to embrace blogging and continues to use his popular online column as a forum to express his views on the business of healthcare, public policy in Massachusetts and the challenges of being a manager in a very challenging field. In this latest post he addresses a problem you wouldn’t think would be problem for a top manager at a facility affiliated with Harvard Medical School: The very real risk to his health his job poses. He blogs at Running a Hospital.
Two stories about being a patient in my own hospital.
(1)
I am really lucky to have a primary care doctor who knows how to
protect me, as president of our hospital, from our well meaning
doctors. Why do I need protection? Well, because the specialists are
really proud of their work and want to use any malady that I have to
show me their stuff. My doctor knows how dangerous this can be!
A
few years ago, I signed up for an ocean kayaking trip in Patagonia.
This was to entail pretty strenuous outdoor living and paddling all day
long for two weeks. The program therefore required a physical exam and
recommended a stress test for those over a "certain age." So I asked my
PCP to order one.
She says, "No. I refuse to order a stress test for you."
"Huh?", I reply intelligently.
"Here’s
the deal," she says. "If I order the stress test, our especially
attentive (knowing who you are) cardiologist will note some odd
peculiarity about your heartbeat. He will then feel the need, because
you are president of the hospital, to do a diagnostic catheterization.
Then, there will be some kind of complication during the
catheterization, and you will end up being harmed by the experience."
CONSUMERS: icyou goes to the Consumer Congress
Our friends at icyou (who by the way are doing a fabulous job with the forthcoming Health 2.0 DVD) are at the 3rd Annual Consumer-Centric Healthcare Congress this week. They have a raft of interviews with some of the smartest people in the pro-consumer care crowd (Michael Cannon and John Goodman), some people from technology (Sheila Mehan from WebMD) some from the old world of health care (Neal Miller from Kaiser talking about how to bribe people to go to the gym ($150 for going 90 times a year! and Bridget Duffy from Cleveland Clinic on patient advocates— Health navigation they call it )—all talking about consumer driven health care.
POLICY: Innovation in French health care, yes really…
John Cohn’s most excellent article about why Michael Kinsley would still receive the treatments that allow him to continue to add not always intelligent contributiions to the health care debate is up at TNR.
Go read—Creative Destruction.
TECH: What health care consumers want, according to Bill Crounse
Consumers want;* On-line appointment scheduling* Web messaging with physician and support staff* Access to lab and radiology reports* On-line prescription refills* Reminders and "information therapy"* Access to personal medical records* Outcomes and disease management tools
Or so says Bill. As Bill is a Director in Microsoft’s healthcare group and their most exposed presence online and probably in RL too, it’s a pretty good bet that this is the eco-system that Microsoft is looking to build around HealthVault.
Health 2.0 on Location in NYC by Indu Subaiya
The
Health 2.0 team converged in NYC this week for a day of
meetings with the New York Times, Digitas Health and a host of our favorite
Health 2.0 companies based in the Big Apple. First it was lunch with
Carly Kuper and VP Patrick Denton of Digitas at the Gramercy Tavern. Among other things, we
discussed the regulatory and legal challenges that hamstring many
pharma companies from becoming full-fledged Health 2.0 players, despite
the many progressive people within their walls.
Next, we caught up
with Sarah Greene, Director of Health coverage for the New York Times to talk about some
exciting new online features at the Times. Sarah told us she is ecstatic about the reception so far for "Well"" the new blog by ex-WSJ’er Tara Parker-Pope. The Times obviously doesn’t share metrics, but she could tell us that Tara is moving up swiftly in the rankings of their in-house blogs. We were thrilled to meet science editor Laura Chang. (Matthew is a huge fan!) And also had a chance to meet with NYT.com Health section editor Michael Mason.
Unity Stoakes from Organized Wisdom helped organize our happy
hour at the Swift Hibernian lounge. He and partner Steven Krein (Promotions.com, Law.com) are pushing full
steam ahead building out the new face of Organized Wisdom on a
wikimedia platform, hiring for a bunch of new positions and getting all
sorts of attention from the investment community.Continue reading this post …
This Week on THCB …
Phew! What a week on THCB. This week’s posts included: The Grand Opening of the Health 2.0 Blog, The VA – Cerner Deal, The Sparse Information Model, Humana’s Change Now 4 Health Campaign, Why Aren’t More Students Applying to Medical School?, Woodstock of the Wonks , Man Bites Dog. Candor in Washington. Plus updates on Health 2.0 San Diego.
