Be careful, or the hospital as we know it may disappear.

Be careful, or the hospital as we know it may disappear.

Consumer responsibility may force some improvements in health care, but the less sophisticated users will be left behind.

I was always taught that America spends too much on healthcare and we could reallocate resources to cover the uninsured, increase wellness and health promotion activities, and improve the quality of clinical care. That may well be true, but, as we have found out over the last thirty years it is simply impossible to achieve [...]

We need to distinguish between the future that’s arrived and the future that may never come.

Each year it becomes more imperative that health care leaders heed the old cliché and set an example for the rest of the organization.

Tax cuts have limited our nation’s ability to provide insurance to the indigent, cover medications for the elderly and keep foundering health systems afloat.

We need to harness the positive energy surrounding the electronic medical record but curb our enthusiasm for it at the same time.

Rising consumer costs, retiring baby boomers and Medicare reform will push health care to center stage in 2008.

We rely on physicians to choose our medicine the way canines depend on us to buy their food.

With the passage of the Wholly Inadequate Prescription Drug Benefit for Seniors (WIPDBS) and the capture of Saddam Hussein, George Bush should be a shoo in for re-election unless the economy reverses its apparent recovery. Bush and his advisors have taken the healthcare issue away from the Democrats while apparently rewarding their supporters in the [...]

Price is a signal, be careful what you wish for.

Techno-futurists are full of it. Technology doesn’t cause anything. It amplifies, distorts, leverages, and attenuates but it does not determine the direction of things. It neither creates flattened organizations nor hierarchical ones. It is neither the cause of centralization nor decentralization. Technology, in general and, information technology in particular, is neutral in both a geographic [...]

The future of healthcare is always clear to futurists: it will be different because of aging and technology. We have been saying this for a long time. Yet if you look at American healthcare from 30,000 feet what do you see? The over 65 population today accounts for only 13% of the population, up from [...]

The Future of Physicians’ Time

Time to stop running faster and redesign health care.

To redesign health care quickly enough to care for aging boomers, we must lead a stubborn beast across a wide chasm.

No matter how smart, well informed, and empowered I may be, when I come in contact with the health care system I am frightened, anxious, and in pain.

In most markets, and most industries, organizations are accountable to their customers. If you make a product that doesn’t work or doesn’t meet customer needs in some other way, then you won’t make money and your shareholders will be unhappy. The magic of market forces makes firms accountable. But markets fail in healthcare. (By the [...]

We have a Bush in the White House. Cheney, Powell and Condy Rice are bombing Iraq. And, health premiums are going up at double-digit rates. It’s 1990 all over again. 1990 was the beginning of big health reform. The recession pushed corporate America over the edge and healthcare became a CFO issue. Back then, the [...]

Health care is complex. It is full of professions, guilds, unions, and community stakeholders, all of which make leadership more difficult. How do you lead in such an environment? I offer, with some humility, my five pillars of leadership: 1. Distinguish between managing and leading. This is by no means an original thought, but it [...]

E-Health, Baby. If Austin Powers was in the healthcare forecasting business, that would have been his clarion cry as the millennium dawned. The IPOs came fast and furious, anythinghealth.com was hot in the market, and the Industry Standard-the dot.com establishment trade magazine-declared breathlessly that “Net entrepreneurs are drooling over the prospect of fixing the nation’s [...]

Next week the leaders of British doctors will meet to consider the future of medicine. The BMA, the General Medical Council, the royal colleges, and the departments of health will all be represented. This is the first time that these groups have met at such a summit conference since the Christchurch conference of 1961. That [...]