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.

Below is our initial offering.  We hope you find it rewarding!
 

Robots That Care
Advances in technological therapy
by Jerome Groopman
November 2, 2009     

This article examines the use of robots to help people recover from strokes and to help people who have Alzheimer’s, autism, and other conditions. Author Jerome Groopman teaches at Harvard Medical School and is Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is also a staff writer for The New Yorker, covering medicine and biology. His latest book is How Doctors Think.

Chaos and Organization in Health Care
Published in October 2009 by The MIT Press, this book was written by two executives with Boston-based Partners HealthCare System: Thomas H. Lee, M.D., Network President, and James J. Mongan, M.D., President and CEO. Here’s what Donald M. Berwick, President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, says about it:

Two of the most skilled and admired senior health care executives in America offer their diagnosis and prescription for a troubled, unsustainable health care system. Their insights rest on decades of experience and sound science, and their recommendations are textured and sophisticated. I hope we have the courage and discipline to listen to them and act.

How American Health Care Killed My Father, by David Goldhill. Get out your yellow highlighter! This cover story in the September 2009 Atlantic is a fact-filled, searching, devastating critique of the system.

Geisinger Health System’s Plan to Fix America’s Health Care, by Peter Carbonara, in Fast Company, October 2008. This Pennsylvania company is being hailed for its innovative management and cost-saving measures.

Joe Flower, Healthcare Futurist. A deeply informed blog from a veteran observer. See, for starters, “Health Care as a Complex Adaptive System.”

Running a hospital. A closely read blog by Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. A guest speaker at Suffolk in 2008, Levy will deliver a guest lecture at Suffolk on October 29, 2009.

Atul Gawande. Among many credentials, Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, an associate professor at Harvard’s Medical School and School of Public Health, a MacArthur Fellow, and a highly influential writer.

Some of his pieces in The New Yorker are newsmakers in their own right. His June 1, 2009, “The Cost Conundrum,” on dramatic cost disparities in the healthcare system, was read and recommended by President Obama, invoked during congressional debate, and the subject of two blogs by OMB Director Peter Orszag.

Gawande’s web site offers a bio sketch, information about his books, links to all his articles, and more. See, too, a cover story about him, The Unlikely Writer, by Elizabeth Gudrais in Harvard Magazine, September-October 2009.

Mayo Clinic President and CEO Denis Cortese addressed the National Press Club on September 18, 2009. This video documents the event.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news organization offering comprehensive coverage of the nitty gritty of federal and state health policy issues as they evolve in real time, as well as trends in health care delivery. Along with text, the web site presents video, cartoons, and other features. KHN is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.