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About Lisa Suennen
Yes, it’s me
Most Popular Posts
- Government as an Engine for Innovation
- The Machine That Goes Ping!
- Smoke on the Water: Fireworks in Cleveland
- Hey, Where Is Everybody Going?
- mHealth: Hallelujah or Bah Humbug?
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- Where The Boys Are…And Not The Girls: Tales from the 2012 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference
- Safe Travels?
- Sugar, Sugar
- Disney’s Habit Heroes: Evil or Evil Genius?
- SXSW: Woodstock for Geeks
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Recent Posts
- Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
- What’s Done Cannot Be Undone
- Avengers Assemble! Prepare to Defend Your Healthcare Coverage
- War is Hell
- Breaking Research: Beer Makes Men Smarter, Women Make Men Stupider, World Achieves Equilibrium
- A Woman’s Work
- Friday Medical Comedy Relief: Crystal Clear
- Driving My Life Away, Looking for a Better Way…to Engage Consumers
- Choosing Elephantoplasty Wisely
- Give ‘Em That Old Razzle Dazzle
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Let’s Get Personal
An article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago described a disappointing development in the field called “Personalized Medicine.” For those who aren’t familiar with this term of art, it is generally used to mean the use of a patient’s specific genetic or other biologic information to match them with specific drugs that are more likely to be effective as a result of the person’s individual genetic/biologic makeup. Many are familiar with the work that has been done to genetically test breast cancer patients to determine whether Herceptin will be effective in tumor control or not, for instance. In fact, the research described in the WSJ article noted that a tumor’s genetic makeup can vary significantly even within the same tumor sample, rendering the application of Personalized Medicine questionable at best. The article states, “The findings don’t diminish enthusiasm for the idea that genetic knowledge about tumors can transform cancer care, the researchers said. But it could make personalized treatment more complex—and more costly.”
I find it very interesting that the concept of Personlized Medicine has been almost entirely limited to discussions about the combination of genetics and medication. … (read the rest)
Friday Medical Comedy Relief: Leeches are 100% Covered!
One of my favorite humorists, Andy Borowitz, apparently has a lot of free time on his hands because he sends out an incredible number of missives on Twitter. Yes, I know they’re called “tweets” but I’m a grown-up and that is an idiotic word.
Borowitz has been actively covering the Supreme Court’s review of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and his (god help me) tweets have been hilarious. It’s a real skill to convey the absurdity of real life in 140 characters, particularly when none of the characters are used to spell out “WTF?” I thought I’d pass some of Borowitz’s healthcare tweets along, as well as one of his recent columns on the topic.
The (so-called) tweets:
- “The healthcare law is unconstitutional and must be overturned.” — National Association of Funeral Directors
- The GOP has consistently supported the right to be born and then, years later, to die in an emergency room
- Americans should not be forced to spend money on healthcare that they could be spending on guns
- Justice Alito compared the healthcare plan to burial insurance, which coincidentally is the Republican healthcare plan
- I
Crowd Control
On March 23,, 2012 the U.S. Senate, acting in bipartisan fashion, probably because they mistakenly thought it was April Fools Day, resoundingly passed the JOBS Act. The JOBS Act, which stands for Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups, is primarily intended to create new jobs by helping small and very small companies have more ready access to capital to grow and thus hire more people. The goals of the JOBS Act are very important to the growth of our economy. There have been a million articles on it, but I am putting a few links in HERE and HERE for your convenience.
The JOBS Act has many different provisions. It enables smaller companies, those with less than $1 billion of revenue, to go public while avoiding and/or postponing some of the more onerous and costly Sarbanes Oxley IPO regulations. An existing law that required companies with more than 500 shareholders to undertake various SEC disclosures has been changed to enable companies to avoid this until they have 2000 shareholders. And the law also makes it easier for companies to advertise private stock sales to potential investors.
One of the most significant … (read the rest)
Friday Medical Comedy Relief: Medical Ethics
A few weeks back I gave you a great link to a piece where Sacha Baron Cohen, as alter ego Ali G, interviewed former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. It was so popular that I thought I’d give you the follow up act, an interview between Ali G and four of the world’s most well-regarded medical ethicists, including:
- Dr. John Freeman, Johns Hopkins Medical School, a pioneer in the field of clinical bioethics
- Professor Edmund Pellegrino, MD, Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and Papal Advisor on Medical Ethics
- Louis Breschi, bioethicist and President of the Catholic Medical Association; and,
- Richard Fischer, Vice President of the American Institute of Homeopathic Medicine
As usual, Ali G gets these guys going, but they have a far better sense of humor than Dr. Koop, to be sure. They cover every thing from euthanasia to cloning to medical marijuana & homeopathic medicine to plastic surgery.
The best exchange is probably the one where Ali G asks the reluctant physicians about their views on cloning. After getting a generally negative response he asks, “What about … (read the rest)
Needed: A 12-Step Program for Automation Addiction (take two)
Sorry to those who may have seen this post already; something glitched out on my posting of this yesterday and so it didn’t go out to my subscribers as it was supposed to. Lisa
Last Thursday I was sitting in my classroom at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business with my co-instructor, Dr. Jeff Rideout; we co-teach an MBA-level class called “The Changing Healthcare Economy” and together we were watching a great guest lecture by Dr. Andrew Litt, Dell Computer’s Chief Medical Officer.
The focus of Dr. Litt’s presentation was the imperative to automate healthcare through the proliferation of a variety of forms of information technology. In particular, he spoke about how essential it is for doctors to have access to analytics at the point-of-care that give the physician detailed information in order to more rapidly diagnose medical conditions and prescribe appropriate treatments. Dr Litt illustrated the importance of such technology by showing a picture of a brain MRI where the symptomatology evident in the image, absent any other information about the patient except age and sex, could lead a physician to one of more than 20 different diagnoses. … (read the rest)
Next Up: A 12-Step Program for Automation Addiction
Last Thursday I was sitting in my classroom at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business with my co-instructor, Dr. Jeff Rideout; we co-teach an MBA-level class called “The Changing Healthcare Economy” and together we were watching a great guest lecture by Dr. Andrew Litt, Dell Computer’s Chief Medical Officer.
The focus of Dr. Litt’s presentation was the imperative to automate healthcare through the proliferation of a variety of forms of information technology. In particular, he spoke about how essential it is for doctors to have access to analytics at the point-of-care that give the physician detailed information in order to more rapidly diagnose medical conditions and prescribe appropriate treatments. Dr Litt illustrated the importance of such technology by showing a picture of a brain MRI where the symptomatology evident in the image, absent any other information about the patient except age and sex, could lead a physician to one of more than 20 different diagnoses. Only by adding information, like medical history and specificity of symptoms–information that is often unavailable to the radiologist reading such an image–is it possible to narrow the diagnosis down to the right one. This … (read the rest)
The Janssen Connected Care Challenge
Beginning in 2013, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) will begin a program of penalizing hospitals that have higher than expected 30-day readmission rates. The program is called the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program and the penalties will be in the form of reduced Medicare payments that will make already stressed hospital CFOs think long and hard about alternative career choices (a great article on the CMS program can be found HERE). Because they can, it is widely expected that commercial payers will jump on CMS’ readmission penalty bandwagon. The result: further financial pressure on already strapped hospitals nationwide.
According to hospital research, consulting and IT firm The Advisory Board:
“As economic pressures place budgetary pressure on federal and state governments, employers, and individual citizens, the outlook for provider pricing growth is weakening. At the same time, a constellation of forces continue to drive hospital expenses upward, further straining margins. And through it all, the rising prevalence of chronic disease threatens to crowd out high-margin procedural volumes with less profitable medical cases, thereby undermining the surgical-to-medical cross-subsidy almost all hospitals depend upon for margin stability. The potential impact of these … (read the rest)
SXSW: Woodstock for Geeks
Turns out there are all different kinds of techno geeks out there. At HIMSS a few weeks ago I was feeling semi-hip among the healthcare uber-nerd crowd that worries about how to make big hospital and healthcare enterprises function with big data. It’s a festival of old-school techno weenies recognizable in the wild by their big company expense accounts and the blue and gray suits that barely cover their pocket protectors. It also felt like a group desperately trying to catch the back of the social networking wave into the world where Mark Zuckerberg and Biz Stone are Gods, not men. In fact, Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, was a keynote speaker at HIMSS and it seemed like the proverbial fish in need of a bicycle. One audience member actually leaned over and said to me, “I have no idea what these young social networking people are talking about.” Poor guy could not have been more than 50 but he was definitely his father’s Oldsmobile. I didn’t want to tell him that by failing to recognize social networking as a meaningful phenomenon he had one foot in the healthcare IT … (read the rest)
Posted in Healthcare, Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare Policy, Healthcare Venture Capital, Innovation, Private Equity, Uncategorized
Tagged aneesh chopra, health 2.0, healthcare information technology, healthcare IT, healthcare private equity, healthcare venture capital, HIMSS, psilos, shwen gwee, social health start-up bootcamp, sxsw interactive, tweet a beer, U.S. Chief Technology Officer
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Disney’s Habit Heroes: Evil or Evil Genius?
Mary Poppins, Disney’s most revered children’s expert, once sang, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” encouraging parents everywhere to mask bad taste in sugary sweetness in the best interests of their children’s health. “Living” back in 1910, the year in which the film was set, Mary Poppins could not yet have known that sugar would become viewed as a generally toxic substance, particularly for the 17% of U.S. children who are now considered clinically obese. For more on this particular topic (sugar, not Mary Poppins), check out my recent post, entitled Sugar, Sugar.
In fact, sugar and other unhealthful, fat-laden empty calorie foods have become key to the successful business model of the Walt Disney Corporation. For instance, according to Disney Corporation’s own website more than 75 million Coca Colas are consumed each year at Walt Disney World Resort, washing down 10 million hamburgers, 6 million hot dogs, 9 million pounds of French fries and more than 300,000 pounds of popcorn. The so-called “happiest place on earth,” favorite vacation spot of adults and kids alike, has done more to encourage bad eating habits than virtually any other … (read the rest)
Posted in Consumer Engagement, Health and Wellness, Healthy Eating, Preventive Health, Uncategorized
Tagged childhood obesity, disney stereotypes, Disney World, Epcot, habit heroes, healthcare private equity, healthcare venture capital, healthy eating, healthy food, healthy food disney, National Association of Fat Acceptance, psilos, yoni freedhoff
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Shameless SXSW Self Promotion
Just a quick note to say I am excited about my upcoming (next Friday) opening presentation for the SXSW (South by Southwest) Social Health Start Up Bootcamp in Austin, as well as my subsequent fireside chat with outgoing Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Aneesh Chopra. The event takes place next Friday March 9th from 2-6 pm in Austin, TX and details can be found HERE. Hope to see you there.