Recently while following my twitter feed, I noticed the following from an associate editor from The Health Care Blog who quoted Dr. Lucian Leape, Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Leape wondered why the patient safety movement hadn’t moved. He noted four reasons: Doctor resistance Doctors don’t do teams Difficult culture. No leadership. Though I did not attend the conference where Dr. Leape spoke, the answer seemed pretty obvious. To solve the problem you need leadership. It is leadership that defines the culture, whether teamwork is valued, and whether change occurs. The reason health care has not moved forward quickly enough simply because there has been a void of physician leadership across the entire health care system. There have been plenty of initiatives to improve patient safety over the past decade since the Institute of Medicine “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System“, but as stories demonstrate many of […] Read More »
Monthly Archive for May 2013
David Goldhill Replies to My Post “Disappointing, Dangerous, Frightening” on His Interview on Healthcare
Posted on May 9, 2013
David Goldhill, CEO of the and author of the September 2009 Atlantic titled How American Health Care Killed My Father and book titled, Catastrophic Care – How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It, recently responded to my post – Malcolm Gladwell and David Goldhill Interview on Health Care – Disappointing, Dangerous, Frightening His comments in his entirety: While I’m appreciative that you came to hear Malcolm and I discuss health care, you really don’t seem to understand much of what we were talking about. My work is an attempt to think about health care as an industry, and using comparisons to how other industries behave to understand why health care delivers such mixed performance — with extraordinarily high rates of error — at such high cost. My argument is a systemic one: bad industrial outcomes are a result of badly structured economic incentives; […] Read More »
Abraham Verghese, Vinod Khosla, Robert Pearl – The Future of Healthcare – Stanford Innovation Summit
Posted on May 3, 2013
I recently jumped at the opportunity to attend the 2013 Healthcare Innovation Summit at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Subtitled IT-Enabled Disruption, it featured opening keynote speaker Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Stanford psychologist and lecturer Dr. Kelly McGonigal, and many other interesting people asking – how do we change health care? I knew little of Mr. Bertolini and nothing of Dr. McGonigal and the former made me think differently about the role of insurers in the new health care reform world and the latter reinforced my belief that the current trend in pushing the complete onus of health squarely on the individual may be too simplistic. But for me, the real reason for going was to hear three of the most fascinating people in health care. First, Dr. Abraham Verghese, Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford, who is world renowned for his belief in the sacred […] Read More »
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