Healthcare

I read Atul Gawande's last book The Checklist Manifesto and was impressed at the coverage of the importance of checklists in medicine – which had primarily proven their effectiveness in aerospace applications. I was expecting from Being Mortal was a...

I’m sometimes a hard guy to impress. Sometimes, I strive for excellence and look for ways to get better, and I forget to appreciate that good is good enough. Maybe that is why I appreciated Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance  so much. It certa...

Years ago I was responsible for creating the technology to support a clinical study designed to test the feasibility of improving patient outcomes for patients with diabetes. The resulting article was published in Diabetes Care Volume 24 Number 6 in June...

One of the challenging ethical dilemmas that faces physicians is when parents of a child tell them to do whatever they can to keep their child alive. The problem is that, no matter how painful it is, there are some situations where death is the right...

Complications impact every aspect of our life. We believe that we’ve got life all figured out, but then come the pesky complications to our orderly, perfect world. Atul Gawande speaks about medical complications in Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on a...

It’s no secret that the American healthcare system is broken. While there have been great advances in healthcare that saves lives and improves the quality of lives for so many people, it is still broken. The problem is that we can’t take a step back and...

Sometimes you pick up a book because someone recommends it, and it changes the way that you view a topic – and it changes the way you view the person who recommended the book.  No Time to Teach: The Essence of Patient and Family Education for Health Ca...

Healthcare isn’t sausage-making. In sausage-making, “what’s in there” doesn’t matter. It’s simply that it tastes good. In fact, most people don’t want to know about the sausage-making process. However, in healthcare, we’re talking about people, and the...

It is not that they set out to be uncaring.  Quite the opposite.  Doctors, most of them anyway, got into medicine because of their concern for others.  That’s what makes the fact that modern medicine, particularly in the United States, isn’t as good a...