Back in September 2007, I created a new kind of doctor practice as shown in the screenshot up there. The iPhone had come out three months prior (but the App Store hadn’t launched yet) and Google enabled you to embed your Google Calendar in a website just the month before. I saw a perfect storm of technology leading to an opportunity to …
Why an Uber for health care is doomed to fail
I was invited to attend a private breakfast with book author, surgeon, and New Yorker contributor Dr. Atul Gawande shortly before Dr. Gawande’s talk at The New Yorker Festival. Over breakfast, Dr. Gawande spoke with IBM executive Dr. Paul Grundy on the future of health care. The event was sponsored by IBM so there was plenty of talk about how technology can and will influence the practice of medicine — …
Can technology be a change agent for health care?
Humans have invented tools to solve problems for themselves since day one. We need to bang something into the ground. That rock over there will work. We need to communicate with one another over a distance. Hey, how about some smoke signals?
The social web is just another tool to solve our communication problems in addition to smoke signals and the telephone. It’s absolutely wonderful at spreading new ideas, new being …
The problem with social media and health
As doctors, we have pills to treat infections and high cholesterol. We have scalpels to replace hips and open clogged arteries. But beyond pills and scalpels, what tools do we have? Walking out of the doctor’s office without a prescription is a rare occurrence these days. And the famous surgeon tagline has always been “a chance to cut is a chance to cure.” We see people when they’re sick and …
Being a good doctor is more than writing prescriptions
Upon finishing my second residency at Hopkins in Baltimore in September of 2007, I moved back to Williamsburg to start a new kind of practice:
It was simple, elegant, and affordable for me to start. But …
Why medicine actively and legally stifles innovation
Do you spend 8 hours in front of a screen at work? Do you then spend your free time watching TV or poking around the internet when you get home? How much time are you spending cooking healthy meals to eat with friends and family? How much time are you doing physical activities that make you happy?
A recent study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology entitled, Screen-Based …
Work should be about optimizing your productivity and health
I received my Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins in 2006. I took a course on transportation safety where we focused on designing roads for safety, making airlines safer, and decreasing the risk of medical helicopter crashes.
In 2007, I worked for Public Citizen, Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy group. Ralph’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed, forced the automobile industry to focus on converting their cars from …
The next generation of public health won’t involve the medical world
Are reblogs encouraging suicides in the gay community?
Recently, we’ve seen numerous young gay people take their lives. Tumblr went purple and spread the word with 29,294 reblogs. The photo above has 17,300 reblogs. Obama even made an “It gets better” video with 704,000 views.
Is the blogosphere contributing and encouraging this recent suicide epidemic? Are we reblogging the stories of these “martyrs” without actually thinking about what we’re doing in …
Blogs encouraging suicides in the gay community
The Futurama exhibit from the 1939 World’s Fair, although pretty in exhibition form, looks like a terrible place to live. It’s a world of machines, concrete, and efficiency. How boring! Futurists have always imagined the “what can we do?” scenarios. They’ve never really asked the questions:
Jane Jacobs, in her excellent book The Death …
Design solutions by truly understanding how humans use tools
Almost every Sunday night, I walk to this one restaurant in my neighborhood for some comfort food (we’re creatures of habit aren’t we?).
I pass a church on my way where an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting is held almost every night. As I walk through the crowd of smokers, I look at them and they look at me. They don’t know that I know they’re recovering addicts. And they put a smile …
Bad lifestyle isn’t a medical issue, it’s a social one
Dr. Marcus Conant, among the first AIDS specialists in San Francisco, who for decades had one of the world’s largest private practices for patients with AIDS and HIV, has left town and moved to Manhattan.
He has been a physician for nearly 50 years, but like many doctors, in the past decade he has become increasingly frustrated with insurance challenges that made running a private practice unnecessarily complicated and a financial …
Bureaucrats determine the business model of a doctor’s practice
If we really want to find out how to damn near perfectly manage any medical problem as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, we should be studying how doctors manage the medical problems of the cash-paying doctors they see in their own practice.
Read part one here.
My visit with Dr. Grubman was fairly simple. We discussed allergy shots and how they could possibly help significantly with my dust allergy. Since I always …
Paying cash to doctors affects the treatment plan
I’ve had disgusting congestion in my nose/sinuses for the past month or so.
I’ve never had a sinus infection in my life despite having horrible allergies to dust. I take Claritin every day for my allergies. But this time, the issues just wouldn’t go away. I needed to go see a doctor. So last night around 8pm I made an appointment with Dr. Samuel Grubman via ZocDoc for 9am this morning. …
Doctors are stuck in the same system as patients when they get sick
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
