Robert Martensen's A Life Worth Living

Robert Martensen, A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).
In recent years, doubtless because of the anxious disquiet
of so many who have witnessed experiences of their friends and families, books
examining �end-of-life issues� have become so numerous as almost to constitute
a little genre of their own. At first

Evidence-Based Policy Making? - Dumb Things Politicians Say About Health Care Policy

There have been multiple legislative attempts at major health care reform in the US. Typically, such attempts feature considerable public debate, including speechs, congressional committee hearings, sometimes progressing to debates by the House and Senate. (For example, see this Frontline chronology of the proceedings up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare," in 2009.)

Will the Current Crises Finally Prompt America to Address How it is Haunted by Corruption and Impunity?

There is one tiny silver lining in the political storm clouds swirling over the US. Some of the issues about which we have been ranting on Health Care Renewal are no longer so easily dismissed. We have long harangued about the ruinous effects of health care corruption, the role of impunity in enabling worsening corruption, our lack of good ways to challenge these problems, and our ongoing

Death By A Thousand Clicks: Leading Boston Doctors Decry Electronic Medical Records

Channeling Lyndon Johnson on Walter Cronkite, in clinical medicine, when you've lost Boston (including MGH), you've probably lost the health IT war.


Death By A Thousand Clicks: Leading Boston Doctors Decry Electronic Medical Records
May 12, 2017
By Drs. John Levinson, Bruce H. Price and Vikas Saini
http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/05/12/boston-electronic-medical-record

It happens every

Massive ransomware cyberattack in U.K. Hits 16 Health Institutions, many doctors reported that they could not retrieve their patients� files, but not to worry - no patient information was looked at or compromised

Perhaps doctors and nurses are clairvoyant? Who needs records, anyway?


Cyberattack in U.K. Hits 16 Health Institutions
New York Times
DAN BILEFSKY and RAPHAEL MINDER
MAY 12, 2017https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/world/europe/uk-national-health-service-cyberattack.html

LONDON � An extensive cyberattack hit Britain�s National Health Service on Friday, blocking doctors from gaining access to

Don't Know Much About Health Care, Health Care Research or Quality - Yet Appointed New Director of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)!?

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is a US government agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), whose mission is to


produce evidence to make health care safer, higher quality, more
accessible, equitable, and affordable, and to work within the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services and with other partners to make
sure that the evidence is

New HHS Secretary, rather than singing unabashed praise for EMRs like his predecessors, states the obvious. However, the "solutions" are the usual boilerplate.

In the past, politicians on both sides of the aisle have generally sung unfettered and uncritical praise for electronic medical records and other health IT systems.

Perhaps letters like this one from Jan. 2015, from near 40 major US medical societies bemoaning the injurious effects of health IT on medical practice, have finally had an effect: http://mb.cision.com/Public/373/9710840/

Through the Revolving Door, Darkly

While the rare appointments to top health care positions by the Trump administration deservedly get considerable media coverage, lower level appointments sneaking through the revolving door do not. So we hereby present our latest roundup of same, in chronological order by first coverage.





Lance Leggitt from Health Care Lobbyist at Baker Donelson to Chief of Staff for the Secretary of Health