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#MomInHospital 17 Aug 2013 | 07:57 pm
A few weeks ago, a middle-aged man decided to tweet about his mother’s illness from her bedside. The tweets went viral and became the subject of a national conversation. The man, of course, was NPR an...
Medicare’s Most Maddening Policy… and Why CMS’s Attempts to Improve It May Make it Worse 31 Jul 2013 | 11:28 am
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...
Reflections On My Year as Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine 1 Jul 2013 | 12:02 am
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...
My New Job 2 Jun 2013 | 10:31 am
I have a new job! It requires me to be sophisticated but accessible, assertive but diplomatic, literary but not highfalutin. Unfortunately, it comes with no office, no salary, and no chance for promot...
How UCSF is Solving the Quality-Cost-Value Jigsaw Puzzle 27 May 2013 | 11:10 am
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 ...
The Dangers of Curbside Consults… and Why We Need Them 29 Apr 2013 | 11:13 am
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 convers...
When I Was In the Final Four 5 Apr 2013 | 08:53 am
I don’t follow much basketball these days. But the week of the NCAA finals always takes me down memory lane. For I, you see, was in the Final Four, thirty-four years ago. Funny thing is, I am an awful...
Measuring the Quality of Doctors and Hospitals: When Is Good Enough, Good Enough? 1 Apr 2013 | 09:25 am
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 o...
HIT Job: How the New York Times Blew it on Healthcare IT 26 Feb 2013 | 01:20 pm
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...
Is the Patient Safety Movement in Danger of Flickering Out? 18 Feb 2013 | 01:28 pm
These should be the best of times for the patient safety movement. After all, it was concerns over medical mistakes that launched the transformation of our delivery and payment models, from one focuse...
