HEALTHY ONLINE

While grappling with the costs and imperfections of our health care system in recent years, a multitude of experts in the field found it useful and enlightening to compare health care to a variety of more familiar industries, and to suggest that health care should adopt operational models that have been shown to work well in those other industries. From the financial industry, we learned that health care must be computerized. From the restaurant industry, we learned that health care must be standardized. Observing Starbucks, we concluded that clinicians must be taught a few things about customer service. Aviation brought us safety manuals for medical procedures, and NASCAR informed us about the superior power of disciplined teams of workers. The history of agriculture provided important lessons on government’s role in creating bigger and more efficient producers, and from the history of manufacturing we learned everything else we needed to know, from Six Sigma to Lean Toyota to focused...

Did you ever read a seemingly inconsequential sentence somewhere and it then just refused to leave your mind for days on end, triggering avalanches of thoughts way beyond the original intent, if there even was one? It just happened to me a few days ago when I read one more industry article about the recent Medicare data dump. The following remark was attributed to a primary care doctor: “The U.S. is entering an era of more accountability and transparency in all aspects of people's personal and professional lives and “medicine cannot be excluded,” he said”.  Back in 1996 a science fiction author by the name of David Brin, published an article in Wired Magazine , where he too prophetically argued that the era of transparency is no longer preventable. Ignoring an entire branch of physics, Mr. Brin suggested that the only antidote to the floodlights shining on each individual consists of a “flashlight” we can use to point at the elites running the lightshows. But Mr. Brin forgot anoth...

So you think there is a war on doctors, don’t you? It certainly looks that way from your particular vantage point. The government is deftly intruding into your professional life with a computerized fifth column that is extracting information on your every move, and to add insult to injury, it forces you to actually collect the data which is to be used against you in the court of public opinion. Media outlets are stepping all over each other to be first in line with sensational headlines implying reckless abandonment to greed in a profession believed to hold higher ethical standards than most. And the ever louder calls to rein in the seemingly rampant waste, fraud and abuse in health care, are becoming synonymous to reining in doctors’ irresponsible conduct.  The art of rabble rousing has always included oblique references to how the mighty have fallen. What is unique about the modern day twilight of the doctors is that it has practically nothing to do with the doctors themselves. T...

It’s here. For the first time in 35 years (or 33 , depending on which click bait headline you clicked on), the much anticipated data on Medicare payments to physicians, has been released to the public, on the historic date of April 9th, 2014. “Data trove shows U.S. doctors reap millions from Medicare”, according to the distinguished Reuters news service. The Washington Post will tell you “[e]verything you need to know about today’s unprecedented Medicare pricing data dump” and Pro Publica , which specializes in rendering doctors transparent, is announcing more tools for picking doctors coming soon, based on these data. If you want to read juicy stories about a handful of crooks who happen to have a medical license, and who were already under investigation by Medicare, click on some of the links above or below. If you want to understand what this all means to you, stay with me and keep reading. The data released by Medicare includes the doctor’s name, address and specialty. For each ...

Sometime during the last year of the second millennium, I wrote my last letter in response to the last letter I have ever received. It’s been email ever since. I don’t recall making a conscious decision to stop writing letters. It just happened. I cannot pinpoint the exact date when my work memos, agendas, proposals and various notes, disappeared from my desk as if swallowed whole by my laptop. They just did. I still have lots of papers lying around, but I recently noticed that I don’t have any pens. Now, I will let you in on a little secret. I can’t type. I have written tens of thousands of lines of code, thousands of emails, business plans, presentations, contracts, white papers and blogs, typing with one finger. I like it this way. I use everything Microsoft Office has to offer, but only ten percent of functionality, or maybe even less, and I use it all day long. I don’t know anybody that uses computers the way I do. There are times when I have to interact with proprietary software ...

Long ago and far away, at the conclusion of a worldwide armed conflict, the winning side was shaken to its moral core by the discovery that massive and cruel medical experimentation has been routinely conducted on human beings.  The perpetrators were brought to trial and the verdict included not just punishment for the guilty, but also a message for posterity intended to prevent future atrocities. It was a code of ethics, very brief and written in plain language, and it was named after the city where the trials were held. The Nuremberg Code eventually became the basis for U.S. federal laws governing research on human subjects and known today as the Common Rule . The first article of the Nuremberg Code is about consent: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.  This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element o...

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