To put it simply, I’m scared by news headlines and conversations about the climbing rates of maternal mortality among Black women. I’m not surprised, however. As an internist, I regularly marvel at the advances that have been made in Western medicine, …
The gender imbalance in nursing, our nation’s largest profession, is a slow-to-change and complex problem steeped in stereotypes, economics, unconscious bias, power, and privilege in health care and society. Along with other diversity gaps in the nursi…
How would you make sense of the following vignette: Over a 40-plus-year period, a disease (“X”) is diagnosed, its causes are defined, and effective treatments are prescribed 30-50+ percent of people working in your organization are currentl…
The Healthcare Incentives Framework helps show how to fix incentives in health care systems. It starts by enumerating the five jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and then identifies which parties in the health care system (providers or in…
I have noticed a profound lack of self-esteem in our profession. I am concerned. Concerned for us, and for our patients. We are the most noble of professions. However, we have compromised our morals, values, ethics, and virtues. We are now living, oper…
Next in a series. The Healthcare Incentives Framework helps show how to fix incentives in health care systems. It starts by enumerating the five jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and then identifies which parties in the health care syste…
Next in a series. In prior posts, I described my Healthcare Incentives Framework. If you haven’t read those, I recommend you check them out first to have the full context for this post. But here’s a refresher of the main points of the framework without…
As my husband passed the milestone birthday of 40, he thought it would be a good idea to get a physical exam as it had been several years since he saw a physician. Easy task, right? We soon came to find that the landscape of health care had been changi…
In the United States, the health of African-Americans lags behind most other racial minority groups. Compared to whites, black men and women face higher risks of chronic illness, infection, and injuries. Taken altogether, the average life span for Af…
An excerpt from Curing the Cancer in U. S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine. Clinical doctors can readily understand the continuing failure of the U.S. health care system. The attending physicians for Patient Healthcare–Washington, both…
