Did you know some doctors once had a hand signal to warn their colleagues about internet-using patients? I talk about this and other health care history, plus a bit about the possible future (including some market opportunities), in an interview with Alex Howard: One study I cite in this segment of our conversation centers on […]
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The cost of satisfaction
My pick of the day for your reading list is a two-year-old article on the use of patient satisfaction surveys as a proxy for quality of care measures: The Cost of Satisfaction (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2012).
Health Datapalooza turns 5 (going on 15)
In my opening remarks for Health Datapalooza‘s final day, I tried to strike notes of “welcome!” and “let’s get real.” The adolescent meme got picked up, but without much context, so I thought I’d share what I said: The Datapalooza is five years old, but we are way past the kindergarten stage, when people outside the movement […]
Recognizing the value of data
In 1999, when I was the editor of USNews.com, the dot-com boom was in full swing. Money seemed to be gushing out of the Bay Area and some sharpies at USNews saw an opportunity to cash in. They proposed slicing out the most marketable piece of the website — the education franchise — and selling […]
False boundaries in health care
Clayton Christensen gave a talk at last week’s SMARTHealthIT board meeting on, as he put it, how people think. I was absorbed by his storytelling, so only wrote down a few concepts: We make assumptions based on false correlations (and we should guard against that tendency). Data and maps are verbs, not nouns, and they never tell the […]
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