The Physician as Grim Reaper – The Ultimate Oxymoron

Confusing lethal injection with the practice of medicine is a fatal error I can’t understand the logic of state governments, on one hand, insisting that only physicians oversee lethal injection while, on the other hand, actively expanding scopes of practice for non-physician professionals. Does the government believe that it takes eight years of medical training to […]

Kaiser and Microsoft Join Hands on Consumer Medical Records

One half of the solutionKaiser Permanente, the largest non-profit HMO in the country, became an endorser of consumer health records this week with the announced partnership with Microsoft. Kaiser has 156,000 employees and 8.7 million customers spread over 9 states and the District of Columbia. They will test out the use of Microsoft’s Health Vault […]

PE in Our Nation’s Schools

A case of “many children left behind” and a nice “FIT” for health care Physical education used to be a standard feature in the American educational system, but it’s barely visible now. And that may be having a much greater negative impact than we realize. Claus von Zastrow, PhD, executive director of Learning First Alliance, […]

Consumer Reports on Health: Worse Than Average

Good intentions do not good tools make, even if you’re Consumers Union Maybe no one at Consumer Reports has a mother. The first rule of effective consumer information is “tell it to Mom;” that is, explain why something is important in the kind of language you would use if speaking to your mother. Unfortunately, the […]

Leveraging Technology to Transform Health Care

A new hope for living to our fullest human potentialIn recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about using technology to help manage disease and disability and to help older Americans “age in place.” But starting with the White House Conference on Aging in 2005, a new dialogue began to emerge, one that […]

Women Informal Family Caregivers

The problem of “non-real work” In the book “In Search of Excellence,” published in 1982, Tom Peters made the case that solving most business problems requires a critical look at processes, and an active, critical reshaping of those processes to allow for simplicity, ease of use, efficiency and reliability. One term he coined, which has […]

Nurses and Doctors Together for the Good of the Patients

It’s a very good thing… What were the biggest challenges you faced as a patient in the hospital? If you could change anything about your hospital experience what would it be? Were there enough nurses and doctors on staff to care for you especially at night and on weekends? Was there a team effort between […]

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