Attorney General Maura Healey Leads Healthcare Reform
As a member of the Advisory Council to the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts, I was very interested in following the internet broadcast of the annual HPC Cost Trends Hearings early in October. At the core of the presentations was a debate about healthcare...
Learning from South Africa
Several years ago I was fascinated by Dr. Atul Gawande’s discussion of ignorance and incompetence. He argued that we in healthcare are no longer ignorant. We know quite a bit about pathology, pharmacology, diagnostics, and various therapeutic techniques. On my visit...
The Older Americans Act
Recently the New England Journal of Medicine published a great article in the “Perspective” section, “The Older Americans Act at 50”. Unfortunately the article is available online only to those who are subscribers, so I will try to give a very brief overview of its...
Community Engagement and Prevention
We all agree on the need for “physician engagement.” I rarely attend a meeting of physicians where someone doesn’t say that the problem with healthcare is that patients are passive, non-compliant and demanding and that a more effective form of “patient engagement” is...
The Triple Aim Before its Time
Lately I have been thinking again about the prescience of one of my most important mentors, Dr. Robert Ebert, who was Dean of Harvard Medical School when I was a student there. In my last blog post I cited a talk Dr. Ebert gave in 1967 at Simmons College, and I...Case Study – Elizabeth Mcarthy
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