Some of us think that the acceleration of healthcare innovation is not being taken seriously enough. But what does it mean to take it seriously? What is one supposed to do? It has always been the mission of the Digest to highlight practical and pragmatic responses to acceleration, and your humble editor’s role at the Detroit Medical Center is precisely to help this 2,000-bed system skate towards the accelerating puck of becoming a trauma center — an inevitable outcome in light of the “massive shift” to the outpatient (and eventually home self-care) setting that serious people, such as the editor of Hospitals & Health Networks, predict.

Despite its market woes, General Motors is clearly very serious about building hydrogen cars: It plans to be mass marketing them in 2011 and to be selling a million of them annually by 2015 — but in China, not in the US. It seems that China may be prepared to build a hydrogen fuel infrastructure faster than the US. If that is so, China will be the big beneficiary, reaping energy and environmental benefits and economic and social advantages over the US. It has already seen and acted upon the future of mass transit with its successful foray into maglev (magnetic levitation) trains. Given the terrible toll already starting to be exacted by fossil-fuel-fed global warming, the US — indeed, the world — needs another John F. Kennedy, and soon.

It is at least encouraging that General Motors’ confidence in the imminence of marketable hydrogen-powered cars is shared by Mercedes-Benz.

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While the world focuses on Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development, a potentially bigger danger may come from something just as horrible but much easier to make: artificial viruses.