“My name is T-Cell…, James T-Cell”
Immune T-cells are licensed to kill other cells through a quick molecular kiss of death, and as such are potentially powerful allies in controlling a tumor. For obvi…
I am not sure how many docs continue to do this, but I still read the actual hard copy of my NEJM, and that means I flip past ad pages with smiling grandfathers playing with grandchildren thanks to su…
Continued progress in multiple myeloma
About 25,000 patients are diagnosed with multiple myeloma yearly in the US. Despite being initially treatable, typically this disease is ultimately lethal. Follo…
Taking a page from HIV to build a response to opioid abuse
A couple of perspectives on the challenges of treating individuals who suffer from opioid dependence. The first highlights the importance of …
There is such a thing as too much hygiene
The prevalence of asthma in children has increased dramatically over the last few decades. Observational studies have shown that children in “dirty” environme…
Summary
Cheap home devices are starting to generate a flood of high frequency, low latency biometric data, much of it of uncertain clinical value
This uncertainty makes designing the service model di…
Adaptive clinical trials slowly coming of age
In an adaptive clinical trial, the protocol of the trial is allowed to change in a pre-specified manner during the study based on on-going study events. …
Disappointing interim results from two ACA experiments
Two papers reporting results from ACA experiments – the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) Initiative in which primary practices were incentivized …
Summary
Livongo is marrying a cellular-enabled glucometer and a data cloud with patient engagement services to help manage sugar levels
Glucometer incumbents could match Livongo’s technology but will…
It is a long-standing hypothesis shared by many providers that community-based interventions that improve primary care could lead to overall healthcare savings by preventing (or delaying) the occurren…
Surgical volume and referral for surgery:
The impact of surgical volume on outcomes has been well documented, but is it top of mind with physicians referring patients to surgery? Readers of the Journa…
The recent World Medical Innovation Forum on Cancer convened by Partners Healthcare in Boston was attended by leaders in oncology from around the world including top: clinicians, bench scientists, pol…
I have been conducting an informal test for the past year and a half. And while it has not been a full statistically-significant clinical trial with test and control groups, and “double blind” testin…
RBRVS: an acronym we ought to think more about
RBRVS stands for the Resource Based Relative Value Scale, and codifies the time and effort involved for a comprehensive set of physician activities on wh…
Please see update at the end of the post.
With new two affiliations, Ochsner Health has solidified its clinically integrated network in the most populous parish (East Baton Rouge) and built a beachhea…
A couple of years ago, we addressed the question of whether drug companies could use new business models to capture more of the value they create. At the time, we pointed out that drug makers had stru…
Could Uber happen to healthcare?
A Perspective article that points out that the success of Uber is rooted in the flaws of an industry where customer convenience and value for money took the backseat …
“Agile corporate strategy” (as defined in a previous post) is already the established the weapon of choice for small, early-stage innovators trying to re-invent their marketplace, where the product is…
The dirty little secret of the booming agile training and coaching industry is that most Agile implementations ultimately fail, meaning that the companies revert back to their previous working methods…
In a previous post, I explored Maxwell Health as an example of agile product development strategy in healthcare. For small single-product companies the product strategy is the corporate strategy, but…
Earlier this month, Mercy Health announced deals to dismantle HealthSpan (the former Kaiser business in northeast Ohio acquired in 2013), selling the insurance arm to local powerhouse Med Mutual, diss…
A new article in JAMA recommends that ACOs and health systems develop patient loyalty programs comparable to those offered by coffee shops, hotels and airlines (McMahon et al, "Health System Loyalty P…
Defining success in health care
A perspective advertising yeoman’s work of the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) which has defined specific metrics for dozens of disease…
Correctional health and correctional pharmacy
2.2M people are incarcerated in local jails and state and federal prisons at any one time in the U.S. for whose healthcare various government agencies are…
This past January, Walgreens assigned operational control of 56 in-store clinics to Advocate Health. The deal signals another intensification of the already fierce hospital competition in Chicago, and…
Leveraging community services for health
In poor individuals, a lot of health issues are intimately connected to their socioeconomic circumstances. However, at the system level, there has been a chron…
Earlier this month, CMS announced the first cohort of Next Generation ACO (“NGACO”) providers (see here our summary of the key changes made in the Next Generation). Below are a few thoughts on who sig…
Leif Solberg and team published research last month contrasting how patients value outcomes vs. how physicians think patients value outcomes. The approach was novel: they asked patients! They identifi…
A new focus on the diagnostic reliability of clinicians
Two perspectives highlighting the recent report from the National Academy of Medicine (formerly IOM) entitled “Improving Diagnosis in Health Car…
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