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The ABIM Controversy: Where the Critics are Right, Where They’re Wrong, and...
“What’s up with the ABIM?” “I just got a note about an alternative board. Should I join it?” “Aren’t you glad to be off the Board?” These days, I get these questions from friends and colleagues...
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Is NLP-Enabled Data Mining the Digital Breakthrough We’ve Been Waiting For?
Natural language processing might seem a bit arcane and technical – the type of thing that software engineers talk about deep into the night, but of limited usefulness for practicing docs and their...
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My Interview With Health Policy Expert Mark Smith
Mark Smith, MD, MBA, was the founding CEO of the California HealthCare Foundation; he served in that role for 17 years before stepping down last year. I’ve known Mark since we were residents together...
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My Interview with “Technology Optimist” and 2nd Machine Age Coauthor Andy McAfee
Andy McAfee is the associate director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is also coauthor (with his MIT colleague Erik Brynjolfsson) of the 2014 book, The...
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My Interview with Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande is the preeminent physician-writer of this generation. His new book, Being Mortal, is a runaway bestseller, as have been his three prior books, Complications, Better, and The Checklist...
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My Interview with Health IT Leader John Halamka
Of the nearly 100 people I interviewed for my upcoming book, John Halmaka was one of the most fascinating. Halamka is CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a national leader in health IT...
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“Being Mortal”: Atul Gawande’s Most Ambitious – and Important – Book
“I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.” So begins Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s fourth and most ambitious book. All of Gawande’s prior books –...
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Meaningful Use. Born, 2009, Died, 2014?
The policy known as Meaningful Use was designed to ensure that clinicians and hospitals actually used the computers they bought with the help of government subsidies. In the last few months, though,...
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Crowdsourcing My New Book on How Computerization is Changing the Practice of...
I have been in blog-silence mode of late, for which I am sorry. Rumors that I’ve taken my Elton John act on the road are, I’m pleased to assure you, incorrect. 7 yr old’s depiction of MD visit (Toll,...
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Hospitalist Potpourri
I’m just back from the annual meeting of the Society of Hospital Medicine and, as usual, I was blown away. I’ve not seen a medical society meeting that is remotely like it. As Win Whitcomb, who...
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Patient Safety’s First Scandal: The Sad Case of Chuck Denham, CareFusion, and...
In retrospect – always in retrospect – it should have been obvious that, when it came to Dr. Charles Denham, something was not quite right. In a remarkable number of cases of medical errors, it’s...
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Global Health Hospitalists: Strange but Noble Bedfellows
As my Division of Hospital Medicine has grown – now to about 60 faculty – I spend part of my time figuring out what direction we should go in. At times, the path is obvious. It didn’t take Wayne...
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Lights, Camera, Action… In Healthcare
About eight years ago I was desperate to improve my golf game. I just couldn’t straighten out my drives or hit my irons crisply. (Yes, I’m fully aware that this is a First World problem). I decided to...
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Diagnostic Errors: Central to Patient Safety, Yet Still In the Periphery of...
In 2008, I gave the keynote address at the first “Diagnostic Errors in Medicine” conference, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The meeting was filled with people from...
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Medicare’s Most Maddening Policy… and Why CMS’s Attempts to Improve It May...
There are tens of thousands of policies in Medicare’s policy manual, which makes for stiff competition for the “Most Maddening” award. But my vote goes to the policy around “observation status,” which...
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Reflections On My Year as Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine
Today is my last day as chair of the ABIM, and the end of my eight-year tenure on the Board. In this blog – a bookend to the one I wrote at the start of the year, which went near-viral – I’ll describe...
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How UCSF is Solving the Quality-Cost-Value Jigsaw Puzzle
I sometimes explain to medical students that they are entering a profession being transformed, like coal to diamonds, under the pressure of a new mandate. “The world is going to push us, relentlessly...
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The Dangers of Curbside Consults… and Why We Need Them
Everybody hates curbside consults – the informal, “Hey, Joe, how would you treat asymptomatic pyuria in my 80-year-old nursing home patient?”-type questions that dominate those Doctor’s Lounge...
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Measuring the Quality of Doctors and Hospitals: When Is Good Enough, Good...
In the past, neither hospitals nor practicing physicians were accustomed to being measured and judged. Aside from periodic inspections by the Joint Commission (for which they had years of notice and...
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HIT Job: How the New York Times Blew it on Healthcare IT
I’m well aware that a good fraction of the people in this country – let’s call them Rush fans – spend their lives furious at the New York Times. I am not one of them. I love the Grey Lady; it would be...
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