ICYMI – In Case You Missed It – December 2015 – for Physicians and Physician Leaders
Women can get online prescriptions for birth control and antibiotics for urinary tract infections (UTIs) or bladder infections from board-certified US doctors as easily as they can reserve time at a restaurant via OpenTable, purchase books via Amazon, or hail a car via Uber. That is what we aim to do with our Lemonaid app (Apple iOS and Android) and website. This kind of hassle-free, worry-free, convenience that we’ve come to expect in travel, banking, and other aspects of our busy lives has finally come to health care. — Davis Liu, MD
Read more why I think this is true.
Health Care
- Is there a disconnect? Is health care really affordable as the leading cause of personal bankruptcy? Health care in Mass. is ‘very affordable,’ Partners CEO says
- Trouble for Kaiser? From Forbes columnist Dave Chase, who notes the rise of a new company, Zoom +, “I’ve Seen The Future Of Healthcare. I Like What I See… ZOOM+ is the iPhone of Healthcare.. Just as old telephone carriers were saddled with legacy infrastructure, Kaiser (and other legacy systems) are saddled with massive infrastructure including clunky, absurdly over-priced IT and expensive medical infrastructure optimized for the old fee-for-service disaster. In other words, they are a Kaiser Permanente for the 21st century without the baggage.
- Cancer care breakthroughs will not happen because the culture of medicine is not innovative or risk taking so concludes a book review by Malcolm Gladwell of Tough Medicine: A disturbing report from the front lines of the war on cancer – “we could save a hundred thousand patients every year—if we let doctors break the rules.” Yet when we do innovate to save lives, people will also die. Recall the case at UCDavis where neurosurgeons deliberately placed bacteria in the brain after surgical resection – Bacteria on the Brain -A brilliant surgeon offered an untested treatment to dying patients. Was it innovation or overreach? Will the public tolerate these inevitable failures?
Outside Health Care
- Having limited resources and boundaries helps generate creative ideas. From the director of the newest Star Wars, JJ Abrams –
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“I find that I am most happy when I have boundaries. With Lost, when ABC chairman Lloyd Braun called to say he wanted me to come up with a show about people who survive a plane crash, I remember thinking, “Well, I will come up with that,” and I did—very, very quickly. What was great was he had given me a very specific assignment. So when I called him back and told him my thoughts, they were far weirder than what he would have ever expected. He was basically thinking about doing a kind of castaway show. But the constraint he imposed allowed the weirdness to kind of feel like fertile ground. Weirdness within limits, you know? If it had been un-limited—if he had called and said, come up with a weird show—I would have thought, I don’t know! What does that even mean?”
- How Company Culture Shapes Employee Motivation – “A great culture is not easy to build — it’s why high performing cultures are such a powerful competitive advantage. Yet organizations that build great cultures are able to meet the demands of the fast-paced, customer-centric, digital world we live in. More and more organizations are beginning to realize that culture can’t be left to chance. Leaders have to treat culture building as an engineering discipline, not a magical one.”
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Personal
- If you want to join a start-up in health care, I recommended reading Dr. Robert Pearl’s excellent 5 Tips on Breaking Into Health Care, and my piece 5 Key Books Doctors Must Read When Joining a Start-up.
- From GQ – Elon Musk profile – One of his companies is trying to upend the auto industry. Another of his companies is trying to put people on Mars. Yet another is trying to bring electricity to everyone who needs it. Elon Musk wants to reinvent the world in a single lifetime. But is the future ready for Elon Musk?
“he believes the first manned Mars mission will be possible by the time he’s in his fifties. He is now 44. The rocket that they are working on is referred to internally by the code name BFR. And it doesn’t stand for some arcane, smarty-pants science term. It stands for Big Fucking Rocket.“
What did I miss? What else would you add?
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