Millennials Are Ditching Primary Care. What's Next and Who Cares?
Earlier this year, our team surveyed hundreds of Millennials (men and women aged between 20 and 40) in three major East Coast cities to...
top of page
PHYSICIAN, EXECUTIVE, WRITER, ADVISOR
American Healthcare was a finalist for the NIHCM Digital Media award in 2015. The blog ran from 2013- 2019, with syndication to Tincture, KevinMD and The Health Care Blog. This is an archive of the blog posts: images and formatting are unfortunately lost. Since these posts are pretty old, some of my thoughts have evolved, and some data is no longer accurate...
Apr 29, 2019
Healthcare's Halo Effect: Lessons from Poland Spring, Maine
This week, after 5 years of happily bubbling in the corner of our kitchen, our five gallon Poland Spring spring water dispenser is headed...
Jan 28, 2018
Switching Costs are Slowing Consumer Adoption of Healthcare Innovation
Healthcare seems ripe for disruption by new entrants, and there has been no shortage of trying. According to a recent report published...
Jan 8, 2018
You Don't Define Great Customer Service. Your Customer Does.
My car was in the shop last week and I reserved a car at a neighborhood Enterprise rental location. About a half-hour before they closed...
Jan 2, 2018
The New-Economy has Created a Trade Deficit in Small Cities and Towns. Healthcare Spending is the Bulwark
I recently drove through Lewiston, Maine. It's no longer the flourishing city it once was, though until the early 20th century Lewiston...
Nov 27, 2016
Healthcare's Age of Acceleration
I recently finished Thomas Friedman's excellent book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of...
Oct 25, 2016
On the Tragedy of the Commons: the Toxic Effects of Drug Co-Pay Coupons
Last week I was driving through Phoenix when I saw this sign at an intersection: It struck me that this was a perfect example of what...
Oct 11, 2016
Specialists and Practice Guidelines: On the Cash Cow in the Room
Here's a personal story about medical overuse and willful ignorance. Stay tuned for the punchline. First, a little background: a couple...
Aug 13, 2016
On the "Bay State Boondoggle"
The Boston Globe recently ran an article discussing layoffs at Baystate Health, a large health system in Western Massachusetts . The...
Jul 5, 2016
Blended FFS and Capitation: Healthcare's "Protective Collar" Paradox
Over a couple of posts I've discussed how difficult risk contracts can be for healthcare systems transitioning from fee-for-service. ...
Jun 23, 2016
Healthcare's "Modern Movement"
For most of my childhood our next door neighbor, Nick, ran a niche sports magazine from his home. Trained as an architect at the...
May 30, 2016
Segmenting Healthcare: What's Your Customer's Currency?
Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time speculating about the emergence of consumer segmentation in the US healthcare market. ...
Apr 28, 2016
Hospitals are Pigging Out on Commercial Reimbursement and Starving on Medicare. What's Next?
The Spring 2016 Medpac report on Medicare payments is out. This annual report to Congress (put together by the 17 members of the...
Mar 18, 2016
On Healthcare as a Complex System: Ensuring Context and The Capacity to Adapt
There is a minor brouhaha in the world of healthcare quality and process improvement. It started with a perspective piece written by...
Mar 5, 2016
How Big is too Big? On "Diseconomies" in Large Healthcare
With healthcare mergers now announced seemingly every week, I've been giving some thought to scale: How big can/ should health systems...
Feb 19, 2016
To Reduce Physician Burnout Eliminate Garbage Time
Here's a new chart from the AMA (reprinted from work done by Dr. Shanafelt and colleagues in Mayo proceedings ) that reports the...
Feb 1, 2016
On Feedback Loops and the Selective Amplification of Random Healthcare Data
Here, within six minutes of one another, are two tweets on the subject of Amazon's fourth quarter results, one from CNN and one from the...
Jan 12, 2016
Consolidating Surgery: Another Example of Balancing Population-Level Improvements with Poignant Individual Loss
In healthcare quality circles it's become a truism that high surgical volume is linked to improved outcomes . If you want to have the...
Jan 3, 2016
Healthcare's Friendly Societies: What Would a Healthcare Mutual Look Like?
For a few years I've been fantasizing about what a healthcare insurance/ delivery mutual would look like . I've yet to see one but I...
Dec 23, 2015
Swiss Flight 188, the Normalization of Deviance and a Better Way to Communicate: Lessons for Healthcare Leaders
I recently came across some captivating footage of a Swiss Airlines flight crew dealing with the unexpected loss of an engine. Watch...
Dec 1, 2015
Express Scripts Undoes Turing Pharmaceuticals: Witness the Rise of the "Activist" PBM
Everyone knows the recent story of "rapscallion" Martin Shkreli : the ethically depleted CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who bought the...
Nov 4, 2015
Administrative Bloat in Healthcare is a Land of Opportunity: On Direct to Consumer Price Transparency
I was recently connect with two smart entrepreneurs (James Millaway and Stan Schwartz, MD) who run a company called The Zero Card ....
Sep 23, 2015
Once A Sail, Now an Anchor: Medicare Incentive Programs are Making Safety-Net Hospitals Unaffordable
Here is an interesting exercise and an unfortunate lesson in the law of unexpected consequences: Pop Quiz: Your elderly Granny...
Sep 5, 2015
Transitioning to Risk- Getting Over the Straddle
This week I gave a presentation on "transitioning to risk" at a great meeting with a large group of seasoned healthcare executives in...
bottom of page