December 2015 - The Health Care Blog

Genetic Testing: The New Frontier of Wellness Madness

By AL LEWIS The Wall Street Journal just reported that Genetic Testing May Be Coming to Your Office Soon. This is all well and good, assuming employees would want their health insurer’s buddies collecting their DNA for no good reason, handling it, selling...

Published Wed, Dec 16 2015 9:31 AM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Al Lewis

Tackling Rising Pharmaceutical Prices: 50 Shades of Gray

By SUSAN DENTZER Global New Active Substances (NAS) Available Since 1996 Here’s the problem with high and rising pharmaceutical prices: It’s not just one problem, but many. Addressing them will require a range of solutions – many of them difficult...

Published Wed, Dec 09 2015 1:00 AM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Susan Dentzer

Reduction in Hospital Errors—Progress, But Still Not Enough

By STEVE FINDLAY Fifteen years after the landmark IOM report To Err is Human, we still haven’t figured out how to count medical errors and iatrogenic harm—let alone sharply reduce them. The debate surrounding this persists, as it must. For example, see...

Published Sat, Dec 05 2015 12:34 PM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Steve Findlay

Job–Health 2.0 seeks Conference Director

Quick note from Matthew Holt, TCHB publisher Our sister organization Health 2.0 is looking for a conference director. That is, someone to essentially be the GM of our conference business, reporting to me & Indu subaiya. We looking for someone who...

Published Tue, Dec 22 2015 1:06 PM by THCB

Filed under: Uncategorized

The little agency that could

By LEAH BINDER In the children’s book The Little Engine That Could, a little blue engine hauls an improbably large trainload of toys and candy over a mountain while chanting, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” The Labor Department named this...

Published Tue, Dec 22 2015 1:08 PM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Leah Binder

Thirty Events That (Really) Did Very Little to Change Health Care’s World

By PAUL LEVY It was with some dismay that I read Modern Healthcare’s article called, “The 30 events that rocked healthcare’s world in 2015.” I jumped into the piece, confident that I would, indeed, find some developments that have...

Published Sun, Dec 27 2015 2:15 PM by THCB

Filed under: Uncategorized

Was Martin Shkreli arrested for hiking drug prices?

By SAURABH JHA, MD I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. I never believed a second shot was fired. Nor do I believe that Bill Clinton was stalked on the grassy knoll. So I won’t speculate that Martin Shkreli’s arrest for alleged securities fraud that...

Published Tue, Dec 22 2015 11:51 AM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Saurabh Jha

Health 2.0 Presents the Final Agenda for WinterTech 2016

By DEEPA MISTRY Health 2.0 announces the final agenda for the WinterTech conference, January 13, 2016 in San Francisco, California. As the only event dedicated to health tech and investing during the health investment mecca, JP Morgan Week, the event...

Published Wed, Dec 09 2015 12:21 PM by THCB

Filed under: Health 2.0, Uncategorized

Saving Normal

By SAURABH JHA, MD The iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said that mental illness was metaphorical, not real, because mental diseases lacked biological substrates. The absence of a substrate predisposes psychiatry to overdiagnosis and avoiding overdiagnosis...

Published Wed, Dec 16 2015 1:51 PM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Saurabh Jha

Physician Burnout Rates Top 50% in latest Mayo Study

By DIKE DRUMMOND, MD Over 50% of US Physicians now suffering at least one symptom of burnout. Depression and suicidal ideation rates even more concerning. For a while now I have been suspicious that physician burnout rates are increasing here in the USA...

Published Tue, Dec 15 2015 10:14 AM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Dike Drummond

The Right Not to Know

By BENJAMIN E. BERKMAN While promising to eventually revolutionize medicine, the capacity to cheaply and quickly generate an individual’s entire genome has not been without controversy. Producing information on this scale seems to violate some of the...

Published Tue, Dec 15 2015 2:33 PM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Benjamin E. Berkman

This Is America: You Don’t Have to Do Anything

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD “I just want you to know, I won’t have a colonoscopy”, my new patient said with some amount of fervor in his voice. “And I don’t want to take a lot of medications.” I looked him straight in the eyes and said “This is America, you...

Published Sun, Dec 13 2015 10:34 AM by THCB

Filed under: NEJM, Uncategorized, Patient-centered care, MD, Amy Compton-Phillips, Hans Duvefelt

“Roads? Where we’re Going, We don’t Need Roads.”

By HANNAH GALVIN, MD When I was 10, Marty McFly rode a hoverboard through a 2015 Hill Valley’s Courthouse Square, and I knew what I wanted from Santa that year. Needless to say, I was disappointed that Christmas morning in ’89. Fast forward to the real...

Published Fri, Dec 18 2015 10:05 AM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Hannah Galvin

The Scientific Basis for Choosing to Be a Patient: Forearmed Is Forewarned

By NORTIN M HADLER, MD Today health is a commodity, disease is a product line and physicians are a sales force in the employ of a predatory enterprise. All this happened in the past 30 years in America1 and the rest of the resource advantage world seems...

Published Tue, Dec 01 2015 4:42 PM by THCB

Filed under: THCB, Nortin M. Hadler

The 2016 Regulatory Landscape: A Review For Health Care Watchers

By PAUL KECKLEY The healthcare industry in the U.S. is highly-regulated at the state and federal levels, and the balance between the two depends on what part of the industry you’re in. To illustrate— Health insurers are overseen by state insurance regulators...

Published Wed, Dec 30 2015 9:05 AM by THCB

Filed under: Uncategorized, Regulation, State, Federal