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" Future of the Hospital A co-founder of a comprehensive outpatient center in Michigan told Crain’s Detroit Business: “[Patients] can come here and get everything they need in an outpatient setting, with the exception of major surgeries.” As of 2008, Americans could also go to one of at least 179 stand-alone emergency departments owned by hospitals […]
Patient Medicine and Social Genoming Following his neurologist’s advice, for 14 years a multiple sclerosis patient took a daily 10-milligram pill to mitigate the effects of “foot drop.” It didn’t work all that well, but the neurologist said a higher dose would be deleterious. Last year, on a website called PatientsLikeMe, the patient discovered nearly […]
Beating Expectations Pessimists said 2020. Optimists (that would be us) said 2010. Well, it’s only 2008, and here it is: a hydrogen fuel cell car you can lease today. It is true that the June rollout of Honda’s “FCX Clarity” is very limited, but given: the competitive pressure it puts on other automakers, accelerating advances […]
In this issue, we have reduced some 23,000 words down to some 3,700. It is still a rather large issue, but it packs a lot of information. The length of each Digest is dictated mainly by the volume of advances to report, and by our skill at summarizing. We could reduce the volume by selecting, […]
This issue focuses on the business and practice of medicine, including: A need to re-engineer the profession of cardiac surgery; a competitive market for medical services online, in retail stores (with some advice for hosiptals), and internationally. Telemedicine is a component of all these growing trends, and is itself growing in acceptance by insurers. A […]
We didn’t deliberately set out to slam the US in this review of policy-related media reports from the past six or so months. It is just how the cards were dealt. In the past year or so, evidence has been mounting that far from having the oft-touted “best healthcare in the world,” Americans have one […]
Personalized Medicine was our Health Future of the Year 2006. For 2007, the award goes to what — for the moment — amounts almost to the same thing: the War on Cancer. When FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach predicted, a few years ago as head of the National Cancer Institute, that cancer would effectively […]
This month’s issue presents a sampling of advances in devices, materials, and robots, as reported in the media in the past six months or so. The examples illustrate that, among other things: 1. (surprise!) HIT ain’t there yet; 2. Technology is relentlessly pushing care downstream, to dentists’ offices and patients’ homes; 3. The European Union […]
This is the second issue of a slimmed-down Digest. In it, we focus on advances in computing and communications, technologies likely particularly to affect health futures given that their existing (never mind their potential future) capabilities have been largely untapped. The one computing and communications device that just about every doctor and patient happily uses […]
We at HFD are as susceptible as everyone else to the accelerating growth of information. The amount of relevant raw material we have clipped in the past three months is enough to fill a book, never mind a monthly (give or take) newsletter. To solve the problem (at least until the tsunami starts to […]
