Experts and Equations
In his 2007 book, ‘Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart,’ Ian Ayers opens with a story of an economist who develops a complex algorithm that more accurately predicts the...
View ArticleThe Mysterious Ginger
About a decade ago, first the tech folks and then the world in general began to murmur. The murmur turned to a buzz and then the buzz became a blaze. Everyone was talking about ‘It.’ Not IT as in...
View ArticleThe Danger of Predictions
I did not choose to write some witty year end posting that wrapped up the major ideas of 2010, assuming that you did not need my HITECH commentary set to the beat and meter of Jingle Bells. The other...
View ArticleGun Runners
Recently I was at a social event and ended up sitting next to a long time friend who is also in the healthcare industry, though he is a ‘dark side’ guy whose company provides information technology...
View ArticleWhat Would Lawdie Say?
I must be getting old. Sitting in a meeting recently where three health system executives (read: Hospital) were talking with bated breath about the coming changes in healthcare, specifically ACOs and...
View ArticleReasons to Go Short
There is much talk about our moving to a transformative, new model for healthcare. This concept has a lot of ideas that we’ve heard a time or two before…moving from fee for service to something else,...
View ArticleA Better Alternative
It seems that the only subject getting more media ink and airtime than healthcare reform these days is the national debt and deficit. Maybe this observation just reflects my reading patterns. I guess...
View ArticleMy Wireless Horror Picture Show
I recently bought a wireless printer for our home. Without the swelling music and creepy shadow lighting that Hollywood gives us in the movies, you might miss that my first sentence is the opening for...
View ArticleSam's Big Idea
Recently, I made a trip home to see my dad. I’d been trying to get there all summer and looked up to realize that youth football and the school year were right around the corner. I had a three day...
View ArticleMoneyball
So, how would you feel if they picked Brad Pitt to play you in the movie? On one hand, you have to be walking tall as you look in the mirror and secretly enjoy the idea that the big money people in...
View ArticleBuzzword Bingo
Years ago, when I was schlepping as a consultant, I had a client where one of the muckety mucks had a serious case of overusing buzzwords. Normally, this was an accusation leveled at the consultants,...
View ArticleResults Reporting
There is a truism that when it comes to reporting results, good news means the report is short, but if the numbers are bad, it is going to take a little longer to explain. If you beat the budget, you...
View ArticleRight Pocket or Left?
Continuing from Monday, here is a little more news about the 2015 Obamacare exchange plans that are now in the open enrollment phase. But first, we need to issue a little public health warning. If...
View ArticlePredicting the Obvious
Several years ago, I gave a presentation about the future of healthcare IT. It was at the beginning of the HITECH Act subsidies and we were experiencing the heady days of the EMR land grab. I was...
View ArticleDuals
Most things are not distributed equally. Proof of this fact comes from our Department of Interesting, but Irrelevant Research, which is what we call it when I go chasing internet links and end up who...
View ArticleMany Thanks
If you are reading this blog post on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we might guess one of two things about you. You may have had to work today, but things are slow and most of your co-workers have...
View ArticleSelf-Service Risk Assessment
Recently, we posted a little piece about how we are entering a period of great and disruptive innovation, fueled by the fact that large pools of data have come together to enable things that we simply...
View Article70 Year Progress Report
It seems good to be Kaiser these days. Everywhere you turn, Kaiser is held up as the paragon of all that is good and right in healthcare, the model which points the way to the envisioned US healthcare...
View ArticleAgain, For Emphasis
There are some things that need to be repeated over and over again because they are so important. Right here, my kids would like to weigh in and say that the preceding sentence just summarized my...
View ArticleSome Serious Inflation
In a time long, long ago when Hillary Clinton was a policy wonk in a headband, I was consulting for a lot of hospital-based delivery systems when they got a hankering to buy physician practices and...
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