A consulting firm dealing with long-range, leading edge technological innovations and their consequences and implications for healthcare policy and practice.
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alt="http://hfdigest.com/wp-content/gallery/pics/robomed2.jpg" Designer Babies Early this year a Los Angeles clinic began offering couples the chance to design their own babies, choosing gender, eye, hair, and skin color, via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis
The US is not the only country trying to reform a huge health system. The Chinese government once covered more than 90 percent of medical expenses but today it covers only about 17 percent,
Doctor Disillusion, Primary Care, Retail Medicine, and the Future of Hospitals A member of the old guard of physicians believes that hospitals don’t care about patient safety, medical education, or nurses, and that CPOE won’t prevent adverse drug and wrong-patient events. His “real job,” he wrote last September in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, […]
Healthcare Innovation: Policy and Financing Issues Last December, a consumer watchdog group questioned the legality of advertising medical devices on YouTube, and called on regulators to crack down on such promotions. The videos tout the benefits of the devices but do not mention the risks, according to the group, in contravention of US Food and […]
The announcement just a few days ago of a gene therapy drug which, in animal trials, reversed the effects of Alzheimer’s, supports our mantra that healthcare innovation is accelerating. That mantra is premised on continuing acceleration in the computing and communication power on which so much of modern healthcare relies. Here, in no particular […]
The genomic advances we wrote about in the last three issues are important contributors to another postmodern form of medicine: Regenerative medicine, the repair or replacement of tissue, organs, and limbs through cellular engineering inside the body or in the lab. In this issue, we digest reports of advances in regenerative medicine from just the […]
This is the third of a three-part series that digests voluminous genomics-related articles published in recent months. The first of the series (November issue) covered the accelerating development of genomics technologies and initiatives. The second (December) covered the impact this acceleration is having on genomics understanding. This third issue illustrates the impact our understanding is […]
The recent crop of news clips pertaining to the future of healthcare provider practice is a tad too diverse to suggest a central theme and weave into a coherent narrative, so for this issue we present them as individual items. “Direct Practice” (aka Concierge Medicine”) There is nothing new about a fee-for-service model of […]
Personalized Medicine is a Science Students who complete a new pre-med course at Kettering University in Michigan will receive a minor in biochemistry. The university’s Biochemistry Department and its Bio-Engineering Laboratory support the program. The idea is to prepare the students for med school, the biotech industry, or graduate school. A Kettering faculty member said: […]
Computing Power Scientists have succeeded in a 40-year-long quest to create electronic components that “remember” their state after the power has been switched off. This will result in computers that start up instantly and retain sessions if the battery dies, and cellphones that go for weeks without charge. Two such “memristors” linked together function as […]
