From the Operating Director
of Suffolk Healthcare Programs

Richard H. Gregg

Few fields rival healthcare in scale, complexity, controversy, and vital importance. None rival it in cost. Media coverage of it has grown exponentially within the past year and threatens to swamp us all.

To help the Suffolk healthcare community contend with information overload, and to help inform our conversation about our field, this web page offers a judicious, annotated selection of items that my colleagues and I deem exceptionally valuable and provocative. We hope you find it rewarding!

McKinsey on Healthcare Issues

This leading consulting firm offers free online articles and interviews on healthcare issues related to hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and strategy & analysis, including perspectives on healthcare reform. Recent entries include these:

“Reforming hospitals with IT investment: Mandated upgrades to health care IT will demand heavy investments by providers but will help them minimize waste and standardize best medical practice. However, the providers will have to take a radically new approach to IT.”

“How to design a successful disease-management program: Five characteristics can help ensure that a disease-management program achieves its clinical and financial goals.”

By registering to read free content, you can sign up to receive alerts when new healthcare content is posted.

Pathways – The changing science, business & experience of health

Scientific American, in partnership with Quintiles, a biopharmaceutical service company, has launched Pathways: The Changing Science, Business and Experience of Health .

A September 20, 2010, press release describes the venture as “a special custom publication and companion website exploring the future of health from a multitude of perspectives.” Through feature articles, essays, and infographics it portrays “challenges, opportunities, risks and rewards in the ever-evolving field of health,” and examines factors impeding and fostering innovation.

“As we enter the second decade of a decoded, accessible Human Genome, and as progress in therapeutics becomes more data and systems-driven, the discovery process, the business models, the delivery mechanisms and the economics are all starting to change,” the release continues.

Pathways’ Publishing Director says, “The mission of Pathways is to make sense of it all. We are presenting health from the viewpoint of every stakeholder -- researchers, patients, providers, regulatory bodies, small and large companies, and others -- and trying to understand what the landscape will look like in five years, in twenty-five years.”

The scope is global. Readers can sign up for updates.

 
"It’s time for a revolution — led from within,” proclaims Harvard Business Review

So states its April 2010 issue, which offers these articles on the U.S. healthcare system:

• On teamwork – “Turning Doctors into Leaders”
• On strategy – “Health Care Needs a New Kind of Hero - An Interview with Atul Gawande”
• On execution – “Fixing Health Care on the Front Lines”

“Powerful trends are at work — all around the world — forcing changes in how health care will be conceived and delivered,” proclaims HBR’s web site, which sketches “12 megatrends that will dramatically change how we must think about the issue and some of the largely unrecognized consequences.” HBR is hosting a month-long online forum on those trends.

Note: Access to some online HBR content is limited to subscribers; nonsubscribers can read abstracts. Suffolk students can access all content via the Mildred F. Sawyer Library web site and can read the print edition of the HBR in the library.

In Medicine, the Power of No

Saying no to unnecessary treatment is, New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt contends, “the single toughest and most important task facing the people who will be in charge of carrying out [healthcare] reform.” Unnecessary treatment drives up costs and can sometimes harm patients.

Leonhardt believes that ”Learning to say no more often will be a three-step process, and if the new agencies created by the health act are run well, they can help with all three.” He explains how, and concludes that “it makes sense to start with the easier situations  —  the ones in which ‘no’ really is the best answer for patients.”

First Do No Harm. Hospitals have a brutal effect on the earth, says a brief piece in the February 2010 Fast Company magazine. They consume twice as much energy as typical office buildings and operate 24/7. Many don't offer welcoming environments for people, either.