I’ve been teaching college for four years now, at a pretty darn good college. But I’m not sure I’ve seen student writing quite as good as this undergraduate writing sample: There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal….
Here is a great piece on my former student, Jessica Harris, who now works in health care price transparency at Aetna. She visited my class this summer, and here are some of the things she taught them: The evolution of transparency in the industry: “2013 and 2014 have been really important years for transparency and…
Here is an interesting picture of how people rate the quality of care in their countries. The US is near the top, but so too is the largely socialized British system: One clear message here: We all have another reason not to visit Russia any time soon!
I must not be the only person to wonder how pharmaceutical companies succeed with direct to consumer advertisements when, stuck in the middle of all their TV ads, are those long lists of side effects. You know what I mean. After watching a smiling and attractive person running through a field after receiving some wonder…
Because so much of human thinking is dichotomous, even though so much of the real world exists on a continuum, we have strange phenomena like the one illustrated in the picture below. The picture shows the significance values of research findings, and reveals that there are many more articles published where the statistical significance of…
In health policy circles (yes, those exist!), experts often refer to three aims for a modern healthcare system – to offer (1) universal access to (2) high quality medical care at (3) an affordable cost. Access, quality, and cost: a possibly unachievable set of goals, certainly in the U.S., where the quality of our care…
In his book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov tells a story about a PR agent who was trying to create some buzz around a topic. No one seemed interested. And then the agent had an idea: “I dashed off a fake internal memo, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to…
A former student of mine who now works at the Advisory Board recently emailed me some figures her company put together, offering a snapshot of how many people are being hired in oncology practices to help patients with their financial concerns: I am very eager to see what these figures look like over the next…
While I was on vacation, I spoke with reporter about a topic near and dear to my heart – importance of getting clinicians to talk about health care costs with their patients. The reporter put together a very nice piece on the topic, which I thought I would share with you: Doctors Aren’t Grasping For…