This morning’s lead editorial in the Sunday edition of the New York Times was entitled "A Formula for Cutting Health Costs" and contained the byline "Alaska natives have something to teach doctors and patients in the rest of the world."
Hospital Care
Lessons from EKG class
"Dr. Fisher, can you teach our residents EKG lecture series?"
Naively, I said "Sure!"
What I didn’t realize is how hard this is to do today.
Hospital disaster planning
In my role as CIO and a Professor of Medicine, I’m asked many questions about the policies, processes, and procedures of healthcare. Here’s one I was recently asked about Hospital Disaster planning. Meg Femino, BIDMC Director of Emergency Management, prepared the answer.
The question:
Can you see what I see? Maybe not, but the computer can
By Tom Ulrich
What if you could just look at someone’s face and tell how fast his or her heart is beating?
The question isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. The movement of our beating heart inside our chest can in fact reveal itself on the surface of the skin, albeit too faintly for our eyes to see. But as you can see in this video, it’s not too faint for a computer (fast forward to 1:25 and 3:18):
Strategies for pediatric telehealth: Lessons from TeleConnect
By Naomi Fried
Imagine yourself in an emergency department taking care of a very sick child. Should he be transferred to a higher-level care setting? Can he safely go by ambulance, rather than helicopter? As a doctor, you would like to consult virtually with colleagues and experts at remote locations.
The destructiveness of measures
A little box pops up before him asking if he asked the patient about the exercise. He mumbles something under his breath, clicks a little box beneath the question, then moves on.
This is what medicine has become: a series of computer queries and measures of clicks. It must be measurable, quantifiable, and justifiable or it didn’t happen.
The challenges of team medicine
How to reduce breast cancer risk? Avoid excess imaging, researchers say | MassDevice.com On Call
MASSDEVICE ON CALL — University of California researchers recommended that women be more wary of breast cancer imaging exams, warning that excess testing may increase a women’s risk of developing breast cancer.
Reserachers dug deeper into an Institute of Medicine report on the environmental factors contributing to breast cancer, focusing on radiation exposure tied to breast cancer diagnostic imaging exams.
Hospice extends life, saves money
Any time you hear someone use the phrase “death panels,” ask them if they are aware of a study of terminally ill lung cancer patients which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010. It showed that those who chose palliative care and hospice lived three months longer and had a better quality of life, with fewer side effects, than those who opted for aggressive treatment.
Telemedicine: Cardiology’s new frontier?
MSM: Will a real journalist please stand up?
"There is some good news about the overly costly, underperforming health care system."
So begins [a] New York Times editorial entitled "Treating You Better for Less." After reading the shallow piece, it hard not to stand in awe of their limited perspective and understanding of the complexity of reining in health care costs in America.