science to profits

Science to Profits: Blog Archives

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Individual Blog Posts

  • Emergence of the 401(k) health plan?

    The idea that health insurance might follow the trajectory of retirement finance, with employer-covered insurance moving toward a defined contribution, 401(k)-style approach, rather than the current, defined benefit, Pension-like approach is one I have written about before. In today’s news (WSJ) is an article describing how a handful of employers are transforming the way they…

  • Petri dish for innovation: Consumer driven health?

    I’ve written before about the idea that segments of the healthcare system where patients pay for themselves may be a fertile focus for innovation because of the tight connection between “who pays” and “who benefits”. News today reinforces this hypothesis, suggesting there are actually quite a few of these potential customers.

  • Who pays for US healthcare?

    It’s a truism to say that “Patients don’t pay for healthcare” in the USA. And historically, new ventures based on the idea that patients would pay out of their own pockets for healthcare innovations mostly adapted to this reality, or went to the wall. But as I have been watching various healthcare experiments unfold, and…

  • Democratization of healthcare innovation: Stethocloud

    Here is a summer story that is a counterpoint to the daily gloom and doom in the news. It’s about healthcare innovation, unlocked by some of my favorite trends: democratization of innovation;  low-cost startups; and the “death of geography”. On reflection, I am reminded of just what powerful drivers of better medicine and reduced healthcare costs…

  • Managed care returns?

    My last post on healthcare costs looked at how hospital and professional healthcare costs were held flat during the nineties. In todays WSJ, an article asserts this was due largely to managed care, and goes on to describe in some detail how managed care is “returning”, although of course in a much better form. Here is…

  • Quality and Customer Satisfaction are different

    Nice post today by Jaan Sidorov pointing out the difference between patient satisfaction and medical quality. Expanding on some earlier themes (here and here), there are at least three important metrics that relate to “quality” of the interactions between the healthcare system and the patient. Patient satisfaction; Clinical outcome (best possible, regardless of cost); Most…

  • Hospitals bent the cost curve in the 90’s

    Hospital Expenditures and Physician and Clinical Expenditures are the two largest categories of the NHE (National Health Expenditure), comprising 51% in 2010. Intriguingly, while these cost categories have been growing rapidly from 2000 to the present, we seemed to do an excellent job during the 90’s of bending the healthcare cost curve in these two categories. If only we…

  • Best outcomes or most cost effective healthcare?

    I have been thinking for a while now that one of the problems with the dialog about improving the US healthcare system is that we have done a poor job of articulating what we want to accomplish. Do we want healthcare with the best possible outcomes? Or do we want healthcare that represents the optimal allocation…

  • Customer service in healthcare

    Great post by Lisa Suennen this week on the two different worlds of acute disease care and aesthetic medicine. It reminds us that there are really two quite distinct worlds in the US healthcare universe: the world of aesthetic medicine (various elective dermatological procedures; cosmetic surgery, LASIK, and the like), in which by and large…

  • Adding micro-nutrients to Quantified Self

    While it’s all doom and gloom when I attend traditional medical device meetings, the group of (often new to healthcare) technologists interested in digital health provide a refreshing contrast. Last week I had the opportunity to interact with a group of impressively pedigreed technology CTO’s who had set themselves the challenge of inventing a new…

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