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About Lisa Suennen
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- Where The Boys Are…And Not The Girls: Tales from the 2012 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference
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- Sugar, Sugar
- Disney’s Habit Heroes: Evil or Evil Genius?
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- Friday Medical Comedy Relief: Crystal Clear
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Tag Archives: psilos
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
9 Comments
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
4 Comments
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.
Analysis Paralysis
37,000 of my closest friends and I attended the HIMSS Conference last week in Las Vegas. For those of you who don’t have a propeller permanently implanted in your head, HIMSS stands for the Health Industry Management Systems Society. It is an industry association self-proclaimed to be focused on “transforming healthcare through information technology.”
Despite the fact that I have worked in and around healthcare information technology (“HIT”) for nearly 25 years (since I was 7), I had never been to HIMSS before. This year, when HIT has become the new, new thing once again, I decided I should check it out.
Have you ever gone to the park where there are a hundred kids attempting to co-exist in the sandbox with one shovel? As you would expect, there would be a lot of screaming, pushing, shoving, cajoling, cringing and toddler-on-toddler contact as everyone jockeyed for control of the shovel. That’s what HIMSS felt like to me. There was such a cacophony of noise, information and activity that I went into sensory overload the minute I stepped into the conference area. In Las Vegas, that’s saying something. I have become somewhat … (read the rest)
Sugar, Sugar
Last week there was a report about a patron of the Las Vegas-based Heart Attack Grill suffering a massive heart attack while consuming the restaurant’s famed “Triple-bypass Burger.” It would be funny if it weren’t so awful, but it is clearly the height of irony. I have written a few articles about the Heart Attack Grill (see here and here) mainly tongue-in-cheek but with a serious bent; but when you see an article like this, it is hard to say anything other than, “coulda seen that coming.” That issue of personal responsibility is a huge theme when it comes to poor eating behavior. Typically, others look at the offender and say, “well, they shoulda known….they shoulda controlled their eating habits, serves them right…now pass the French fries.”
From an academic standpoint, however, that issue of diet-related personal responsibility is in question. Well-known physician and researcher, Robert Lustig, a leader in the UCSF Department of Pediatrics and the Director of the UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment, Study and Treatment believes there is more to the story. This is a guy who has made a career of studying and treating … (read the rest)
Posted in Consumer Engagement, Health and Wellness, Healthy Eating, Preventive Health, Uncategorized
Tagged claire brindis, daniela jakubowicz, dessert for breakfast, diabetes, healthy eating, heart attack grill, high fructose corn syrup, mars inc, obesity, psilos, robert lustig, soda tax, sugar, sugar regulation, toxic truth about sugar
2 Comments
Safe Travels?
I am writing this from seat 13F on Southwest’s flight to Orange County, CA, headed to my role as chairman of this year’s IBF Conference on Consumer Health and Wellness Innovation. Ironic, I think, as I have become increasingly confident that air flight is the antithesis of health and wellness. Some people believe that the most dangerous place on earth is Somalia or Syria or the inside of Newt Gingrich’s brain, but in terms of places I am likely to go, I think that the inside of one of these flying tubes ranks right up there.
As I read my notes for the conference while standing in the line to board the plane, I noticed that the sign at the plane’s door informs you that the jet fuel fumes that permeate the jetway are known to cause cancer and birth defects. That was, of course, the first note of irony in my day, as I was reading about the kinds of activities individuals can and should do to minimize the risk of such afflictions as diabetes and cancer. The lists always includes eating broccoli and getting proper sleep, but no … (read the rest)