Are Consolidation, Competition, and Innovation the Answer? Part 3: A Closer Look at Consolidation
Consolidations, affiliations, acquisitions and mergers in healthcare are announced every week. The picture associated with this posting reveals that an affiliation occurred a few years ago between the critical access hospital in my little town and the Dartmouth...
Are Consolidation, Competition, and Innovation the Answer? Part 2: A Closer Look at Innovation
“Consolidation, competition, and innovation are the answer to what?”, you might ask. Keeping it simple, I mean the high cost of care and the Triple Aim. To keep it short I could just say, all three will help, but even maximized to the nth degree they will never in and...
Are Consolidation, Competition, and Innovation the Answer? Part 1
Are systems consolidation, competition and innovation the triple play that will deliver quality care for everyone at a sustainable cost? Perhaps before we try to answer that question we should avail ourselves of the lessons learned over the efforts of the last fifty...
Getting Beyond Hyperpartisanship on the Road to the Triple Aim
Last week when I copied and pasted the conclusions in the JAMA article by President Obama I discovered that Google Drive did not know the word “hyperpartisanship.” . Did Google’s ignorance of hyperparisanship suggest that we are experiencing something new?...
What’s Next in the Healthcare Debate?
I was delightfully dazed and confused the morning after Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain launched us into the next phase of the healthcare debate by giving the ACA a last minute reprieve. In a mix of ecstasy and disbelief I watched the video of John...
“Us/Them-ing”: A Barrier to Bipartisan Healthcare Solutions
Sometime after midnight on July 28, I closed my computer. After finishing my weekly letter, I had been watching C-Span 2 on the computer while watching Stephen Colbert do his nightly dissection of the Trump administration on my television. As I turned out the light, I...
Better Healthcare Requires A Bipartisan Expression of Reciprocal Altruism
A major event that changed the way I see the world occurred in 1995 when I read Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are: the New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. The book was so good that I immediately gobbled up Nonzero: The Logic of Human...
Overcoming Individualism and Collectivism: Different Mindsets That Make Improving Healthcare Difficult
I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and the Kaiser Health News Service and follow their various links that take me to a variety of different sources. I tune in to NPR and watch breaking news on CNN. I follow links all over the Internet trying to...
Contemplation and Action on the Road to the Triple Aim
A few years ago Patty Gabow, the retired CEO of Denver Health and a master of using Lean to benefit the underserved, and I were enjoying a dinner together while we were attending a meeting. Our conversation had gotten to the level of sharing and openness where we were...Case Study – Elizabeth Mcarthy
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