Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Being An Entrepreneur In Health Care: How To Set Yourself Up For Success

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur in health care?

Twice in the last two weeks I had the honor of speaking at Northeastern University’s Health Sciences Entrepreneurs Program. It’s a terrific program, dedicated to fostering the creation of health care businesses by helping the people who build them figure out how to do it. That it exists is a testament to how strong the American spirit of entrepreneurship really is – and how the 21st century economic engine is going to be health care.

But the hundreds of students and alumni who attended the events already knew this. What they wanted to know were the answers to more practical questions – Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at BestDoctors.com: See First Blog*

Are Electronic Medical Records A $27 Billion Waste Of Money?

President Obama’s has created an incentive program to encourage physicians to adopt functional Electronic Medical Records.  The program’s $27 billion dollars (funded by President Obama’s Economic Stimulus package) will turn out to be a colossal failure and a waste of money.

Twenty seven billion dollars would provide $44,000 for 640,000 physicians. After the bureaucratic infrastructure is built the federal government will be lucky if one third of the money remains for bonuses to physicians.

Only 21,000 of 650,000 (3%) of physicians have applied to date.

Complex bureaucracies and complicated regulations never save money. These bureaucracies create bigger government, inconsistent policies, more complicated regulations and inefficiencies.

The best and cheapest way to create a universally accepted and functional EMR is for the federal government to put the software in the cloud and charge physicians by the click for the use of the Ideal Medical Record.

Upgrades in software to the Ideal Medical Record will be swift , inexpensive and instantly adopted. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

We’ve Tried Single-Payer Healthcare, And It Has Failed

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, the United States has already tried its hand at a pseudo-single-payer system. The VA is one example. Another, albeit less highly publicized, is the Indian Health Service. (via WhiteCoat)

Based on an agreement in 1787, the government is responsible to provide free health care to Native Indians on reservations. And, as you can see from this scathing story from the Associated Press, that promise has not been kept.

The numbers don’t lie:

American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease.American Indians have disproportionately high death rates from unintentional injuries and suicide, and a high prevalence of risk factors for obesity, substance abuse, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage pregnancy, liver disease and hepatitis.

And, after Haiti, where in the Western hemisphere do men have the lowest life expectancy? It’s on Indian reservations in South Dakota.

The primary reason, not surprisingly, is lack of money, compounded by a difficult time recruiting physicians and other clinicians. Indeed, many Indian health clinics cannot “deal with such high rates of disease, and poor clinics do not have enough money to focus on preventive care.”

So, if you’re in the camp that supports a Medicare-for-all-type solution to our health care woes, consider how that same government, whom you’re entrusting to be the single-payer, has neglected the Indian Health Service.

*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles