Wall Street Journal

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Chuck Lauer: An IT Boondoggle?

Chuck Lauer | Becker's Hospital Review | October 8, 2012

A recent Wall Street Journal article left me speechless. Like a lot of other people in healthcare I have been indoctrinated with the belief that unless the industry fully and enthusiastically adopts information technology, hospital and health systems will never run efficiently and be able to deliver quality healthcare to patients... Read More »

Coronavirus Lessons From the Asteroid That Didn't Hit Earth

Benny Peiser and Andrew Monfort | Wall Street Journal | April 2, 2020

London: The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modeling to predict the future. The most consequential coronavirus model, produced by a team at Imperial College London, tipped the British government, which had until then pursued a cautious strategy, into precipitate action, culminating in the lockdown under which we are all currently laboring. With the Imperial team talking in terms of 250,000 to 510,000 deaths in the U.K. and social media aflame with demands for something to be done, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had no other option. But last week, a team from Oxford University put forward an alternative model of how the pandemic might play out, suggesting a much less frightening future and a speedy end to the current nightmare.

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Executive Bonuses: An Excess Of Crony Capitalism And Corruption

Howard Brody | The Economism Scam | June 13, 2013

I recently had my attention called to a great post on the WSJ.com blog by Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University in Montreal. Though it’s the opposite of the sort of advice one would expect to get from the Wall Street Journal, it was apparently first posted in 2009 and then re-upped in November, 2012: Read More »

Halamka's 2016 Predictions for Health IT

As the year ends and we archive the accomplishments and challenges of 2015, it’s time to think about the year ahead.  Will innovative products and services be social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC)?  Will wearables take off?  Will clinicians be replaced by Watson?   Here are my predictions...Apps will layer on top of transactional systems empowered by FHIR...a better approach is crowdsourcing among clinicians that will result in value-added apps that connect to underlying EHRs via the protocols suggested in the Argonaut Project (FHIR/OAuth/REST). One of our clinicians has already authored a vendor neutral DICOM viewer for images, a patient controlled telehealth app for connecting home devices, and a secure clinical photography upload that bypasses the iPhone camera roll. That’s the future.

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In God We Trust, All Others (Don't) Pay Cash

I was intrigued by a recent Wall Street Journal article about how some retail establishments won't accept cash as a form of payment, citing Drybar, Sweetgreen, and at least one Starbucks location. Cashless is touted as faster, safer, easier to administer, and in line with most customers' preference. Indeed, a new study from the Pew Research Center found that 29% of all U.S. adults don't use cash at all in their typical week, up from 24% in 2015. The higher the household income, the less cash was used. Alistair Johnson writes in Forbes that, hey, if we're going to a cashless society, we should make it a cardless one as well, not simply replace our cash with those pieces of plastic we use for debit/credit. I think he's on to something there, and both discussions made me think about how we change the constructs of our everyday lives -- including in healthcare.

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Is China Already in the 21st Century in the Fields of AI for Healthcare and Quantum Computing?

It is 2018 everywhere, but not every country is treating being in the 21st century equally. China is rushing into it, even in healthcare, while the United States is tip-toeing its way towards the future. Especially in healthcare. Ready or not, the future is here...and the U.S. may not be ready...Artificial Intelligence: Yes, the U.S. has been the leader in A.I., with some of the leading universities and tech companies working on it. That may not be enough. A year ago China announced that it intended to be the world leader in A.I. by 2025. The Next Web recently concluded that China's progress since then "remains unchecked." China is far outspending the U.S. on A.I. research and infrastructure, coordinating efforts between government, research institutes, universities, and private companies. Dr. Steven White, a professor at China's Tsinghua University, "likens the country's succeed at all costs AI program to Russia's Sputnik moment." We have yet to have that wake-up call...

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Is The EHR Transition Hitting Speed Bumps Or A Concrete Wall?

Jeff Rowe | Government Health IT | March 8, 2013

We interrupt this policy initiative for a period of reassessment! No, there’s no formal reconsideration of the HITECH act under way, but this article does a nice job of chronologically lining up numerous objections or challenges to the goals and methods of HITECH which, the author suggests, may indicate that a “backlash” is underway. Read More »

It's 2019. Smartphones are Out...On to the Next Big Thing...

It's amusing to watch old movies where plot points often involved someone's inability to talk to the person they needed, in the pre-mobile phone era. We take our smartphone's omnipresence and virtual omnipotence as a given in our daily lives and treat even its temporary loss as a major inconvenience. So why are people already wondering if the smartphone era is almost over? Speculation on this is not new (voice has been touted as the next big platform for years), but intensified after Apple announced reduced revenue expectations earlier this year -- the first time in 16 years. It specifically cited slower iPhone sales in China and, even more jarring, said it would no longer break out unit sales of iPhones...

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On the Financial Conflicts of Interests of Medical Societies and Rising Drug Prices

The notion that health care prices are high and are rising continuously in the US should hardly be novel...We first posted about high drug prices in July, 2005, with the example of BilDil...But only a few days later we noted that three cancer costs had yearly costs in the five figures, and one, Erbitux, cost as much as $100,000.  Most amazingly we noted that Thalidomid was priced at $25,000  a year...Since then, the ridiculously high prices of many tests and treatments, but most notably new drugs and devices, has been so widely covered, our discussion has been limited to special cases.,,

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Say No To Bureaucrats And Yes To Direct Care

John Umbehr | KevinMD.com | May 17, 2014

Yes, it really is time to revoke the health care mandates issued by bureaucrats who are not in the profession of actual healing.  Daniel F. Craviotto Jr. writes in the Wall Street Journal, “In my 23 years as a practicing physician, I’ve learned that the only thing that matters is the doctor-patient relationship.”...

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The Economics Of Surveillance

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries | The Wall Street Journal | September 28, 2012

You are being watched. Surveillance of your activities – and those of most Americans – is now just a fact of everyday life. People are monitored when they browse the Web, when they use their cellphones, when they drive and when they use their credit cards, among other things. Read More »

The Right to Repair Ourselves

Geoffrey Fowler wrote an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal: We Need the Right to Repair Our Gadgets.  He describes how manufacturers have made it difficult for us to fix our personal tech gadgets (The Guardian concluded the same earlier this year), and discusses how he's managed to overcome some of those obstacles. As I was reading it, I kept thinking, boy, replace "gadgets" with "our bodies" and "manufacturers" with "health care professionals," and he could be talking about health care.

U. S. Electronic Health Record Initiative: A Backlash Growing?

Robert N. Charette | IEEE.org | March 7, 2013

There seems to be a slow but steady backlash growing among healthcare providers against the U.S. government’s $30 billion initiative to get all its citizens an electronic health record, initially set to happen by 2014 but now looking at 2020 or beyond. Read More »

US hospital takes legal action against Cerner - why it matters to the NHS

Tony Collins | Computerworld UK | June 29, 2012

Small Kansas hospital in legal action against e-patient record supplier Cerner. The Girard Medical Center’s story illustrates "the risks for organizations of all kinds when they attempt to innovate by bringing in new, and unfamiliar, technologies and vendors." Read More »

WSJ Blasts Apple E-books Antitrust Judge In Scathing Editorial

Shane Cole | Apple Insider | December 6, 2013

A new opinion piece lambasts Judge Denise Cote, the federal judge in charge of the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Apple, for being "abusive" and "shredding the separation of constitutional powers" by appointing and granting broad authority to antitrust monitor Michael Bromwich. Read More »