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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

The trend to medical tourism is picking up the pace, with ever more creative choices and unbeatable prices. It is understandable that unions would be concerned about it, but the over-my-dead-body response of the United Steelworkers is unfortunate and misguided. While unions can slow the trend, they can’t stop it, and they may do a […]

A fellow futurist asserts that while any specific future is dynamic and therefore unknowable, every decision and every plan involves prediction. Yet plans and decisions made by healthcare institutions are typically based on denial, bluster, or panic about the predictions. Take proton beam therapy for cancer, for example. Everything coming out of cancer research today […]

A New York Times analysis of factors driving a trend toward complementary or alternative medicine neglects to mention the one factor we would have thought to be obvious: Lack of affordable access to conventional medicine; not to mention access to “concierge” or “boutique” medicine, about which the ethical debate seems as intractable as the debate […]

Games Surgeons Play; Personalized Medicine; Virtual Patients; Younger Doctors Better; Home-use Genetic Tests Begin; Buy Health at Sam’s Club Games Surgeons Play Source article. A New York surgeon is using video games to help develop and train a new generation of surgeons. The surgeon — co-author of a recent study that concluded that surgeons who […]

Singapore is showing that hospitals everywhere need to stop thinking in terms of local service areas and start thinking globally. The island state is merely taking advantage of cheap travel, Internet communications, and its entrepreneurial mindset to attract patients from all over the world. And this is without even considering the border-busting capabilities of telemedicine […]

A list of market strategies outlined by a maker of a “disruptive” hearing health technology is indicative of the challenge facing healthcare executives as more technologists adopt such strategies. It is salutary to be reminded that forces other than technology shape the future of healthcare. A pundit points to major potential disruptions from: the hospital […]