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 […]

Being Poor and Sick in the U.S.

Health system reform for the “Two Americas” Since I started medical school nearly 40 years ago, I’ve seen a lot of changes in health care. Not all of them have been for the better. A recent study by Dr. Majid Ezzati and colleagues at Harvard, for example, lays out some sobering facts about the inequities […]

Universal Health Care One State At a Time?

Potholes in the road to universality Twelve states are currently, in one way, shape or form, pursuing universal health coverage for their citizens. When states take this on, they’re not all starting from the same point. In fact, if you take a giant broom, and sweep it west to east across the southern portion of the […]

New York Patient Safety Bill Would Try Physicians in the Court of Public Opinion

Proposed bill may unintentionally harm the innocent and discourage physicians from practicing New York State is moving forward with a proposal that will improve patient safety by alerting the public early when doctors are charged with a misconduct or crime. Currently, the public is notified when a physician is convicted of misconduct – a process […]

Palliative Care

Lighting the way to home-centered health careIn recent years I have frequently written about and discussed the need for a "parallel build-out" in order to achieve truly preventative care in the United States. This refers to the challenge on the one hand of better managing our current burden of chronic disease in mostly older Americans, […]

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