February 2011 - The Health Care Blog

NIH’s New Drug Discovery Center: Heading Into the Swamp?

By DEREK LOWE, PHD I’ve been meaning to comment on the NIH’s new venture into drug discovery, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Curious Wavefunction already has some thoughts here, and I share his concerns. We’re...

Published Tue, Feb 15 2011 8:43 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: pharmaceuticals, Op-Ed, NIH, Francis Collins, Derek Lowe, NCATS

Health IT Future: A Tale of Three Watsons

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON If you want to see the future of health information technology, take a look at the dueling visions of two Thomas Watsons that are on display this month in a game show and a trade show. The juxtaposition unintentionally demonstrates...

Published Mon, Feb 14 2011 6:48 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Michael Millenson, Watson, IBM, Tech, Mobile health apps

NIH and New Drugs — New Study Says 1 in 5

By MERRILL GOOZNER For most of the past decade, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have competed over who could pour more money into the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. But the party is over. The...

Published Mon, Feb 14 2011 4:51 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: pharmaceuticals, Merrill Goozner, NIH, NEJM, Drug development

NIH and Drug Innovation

By MERRILL GOOZNER For most of the past decade, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have competed over who could pour more money into the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. But the party is over. The...

Published Mon, Feb 14 2011 4:51 PM by The Health Care Blog

Filed under: Merrill Goozner, Op-Ed, NIH, NEJM, Drug development

A Game-Changing Statistic: 1 in 250

By BOB WACHTER, MD Although the medical profession has been harming unlucky patients for centuries, the patient safety movement didn’t take flight until 1999, when the Institute of Medicine published its seminal report, To Err is Human. And that report...

Published Fri, Feb 11 2011 6:59 AM by The Health Care Blog

The Real Cost of Early Elective Deliveries

By VANESSA HURLEY What if I told you that across the country there’s a procedure being performed on pregnant women that makes their newborns more likely to end up sick and in a $3,000-a-day Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)? Too... Read More...

Published Thu, Feb 10 2011 11:39 AM by The Health Care Blog

How to Meaningfully Shop for an EHR

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE So you’ve been hearing all about the recent EHR buzz and decided to give it a try. Whether you are convinced that electronic records are the way to go, or you have reached a point where you... Read More...

Published Thu, Feb 10 2011 10:30 AM by The Health Care Blog

Exploitations of Immortality

By FRANK PASQUALE, JD Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has quite a following among health lawyers. As an excerpt from the book explains, Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same... Read...

Published Thu, Feb 10 2011 9:15 AM by The Health Care Blog

OrganizedWisdom storms the waiting room!

By Matthew Holt OrganizedWisdom is one of the more innovative Health 2.0 content and search companies, and the dynamic duo of Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes just pulled off an interesting coup by getting OW's wisdom cards into the ubiquitous... Read...

Published Thu, Feb 10 2011 1:21 AM by The Health Care Blog

Things Are About to Get Ugly

By ROBERT LASZEWSKI Word is that House Republicans will attach an amendment to the latest federal spending bill that will cut-off funding for the health care bill. The last Congress never finalized a budget for the current fiscal year—the feds... Read...

Published Wed, Feb 09 2011 3:02 PM by The Health Care Blog

Cruel Shoes

By JOHN HENNING SCHUMANN, MD A thirtysomething friend of mine, let's call her Sally, started running last year in an effort to get in better shape. As often happens in these scenarios, Sally developed some foot pain. So she went... Read More...

Published Wed, Feb 09 2011 12:26 PM by The Health Care Blog

Ethical Blinders?

By PAUL LEVY Is this a case of ethical blinders? Today's New York Times has an important story about the ineffectiveness of removal of lymph nodes for certain women with *** cancer. That is a significant result of clinical research.... Read More....

Published Wed, Feb 09 2011 11:00 AM by The Health Care Blog

Where Doctors Locate

By JOHN GOODMAN, PhD Pop quiz. How many doctors are at the top of Mt. Everest? None, actually. Yet, think about how many people get sick up there. Think about how many die. Do you think extra bonus payments could... Read More...

Published Tue, Feb 08 2011 8:01 PM by The Health Care Blog

Deciding What Works

Steven Goldberg Is probably best known for the controversial "Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets: Why Philanthropy Doesn't Advance Social Progress." In this post he looks at the ways in which success and failure are measured in his...

Published Tue, Feb 08 2011 8:38 AM by The Health Care Blog

Transmogrifying California Healthcare

By LISA SUENNEN I’m really looking forward to this coming Friday, February 4th, as I get to moderate a panel on “The Impact of Health Reform on California.” The panel, which was organized by UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies... Read More...

Published Tue, Feb 08 2011 7:30 AM by The Health Care Blog